While the term industry conjures ideas of companies and businesses, industry engagement in the university sector, including the Higher Degrees by Research context, includes a wide range of organisations including communities, government and the not-for-profit sector.
Industry engagement can create a range of benefits for you, your HDR research, and your current and future career. You can apply and expand your skills to real-world settings, provide insight into career options, and enhance your professional network. From a research perspective, engagement can offer new perspectives, opportunities to recruit study participants, different problems to solve, and avenues for research translation.
Your industry engagement can also lead to positives outcomes – including knowledge sharing, network expansion, and potential new collaborations – for supervisors, other candidates, and the broader UniSA research community.
Engagement can occur in many ways along a continuum from minimal two-way interaction through to intensive collaboration. The way that you engage with industry might depend on your research aims and outcomes, research methodologies, and career goals.
Examples of industry engagement can include:
Building industry engagement into your research planning will assist with maximising the benefits of the engagement for your research and career. Planning early in your candidature will enable time to organise and smoothly integrate the activities into, to inform, or around, the phases of your research.
UniSA particularly favours industry engagement that comply with the Australian Government’s Research Training Program (RTP) industry internship weighting. An eligible industry internship occurs when a research doctorate candidate, who completes their higher degree by research on or after 1 January 2022, undertakes a research internship with a research end-user that:
The industry internship can be undertaken at any point throughout the degree, provided the internship requirements above are satisfied before completion.
Complete the required Internship Preparation Modules to maximise the benefits and undertake a safe, ethical and legal internship. Or identify whether you might be eligible for an exemption to the required modules by reviewing the Internship Preparation Modules Exemption Form.
Discuss options for industry engagement relevant to your research and career with your supervisory panel. You can also find out more about internships or industry PhD programs through these links:
Watch an overview of what internships involve, the benefits and different models.
Learn about the National Industry PhD Program and CSIRO Industry PhD Program
Learn about the steps involved in establishing an internship.