If you don’t have the work experience to land the job you desire – skill-up and specialise.
That is Rachel Walker’s modus operandi and what led her to the University of the Sunshine Coast to enrol in a double degree in Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Communication – majoring in Marketing and Social Media.
With earlier aspirations to work in website design, Rachel graduated from Griffith University with a Bachelor of Multimedia in 2019.
While she powered through the programming courses in the degree, she didn’t enjoy that aspect.
Fortuitously – during a work placement at a boutique social media agency – she developed a keen interest in marketing, including graphic design and photography and, perhaps most fervently, the creation of social media content.
Rachel was inspired to apply for marketing and social media roles after graduation. When she was told by prospective employers that she lacked the required work experience, she was undeterred –and perhaps more motivated than ever.
Fired up with ambition, she enrolled at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Moreton Bay campus to pursue a double degree in Business and Communication, majoring in the two specialist fields she needed to pursue her dream career.
During a recent work placement with Sunshine Coast Lightning netball team, Rachel relished aspects such as developing marketing and content plans for Lightning’s upcoming community and partner events, developing photography and videography briefs for the club’s content creators, updating the Lightning website, assisting with editing player images and updating social graphics in Photoshop (using skills from her first degree) and researching inspiration for social graphics for the club’s 2025 season.
The hands-on work experience helped Rachel to further focus her long-term career goals, steering her towards specialising in social media with the integration of photography – another area of interest that has developed during her studies.
”Prior to the internship I was more focused on marketing than social media, but planning out the videography and photography collateral and seeing how it could be transformed into engaging content that captures users’ attention, was really inspirational and has helped refocus my career direction,” Rachel explains.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor Michael Wilmore says the hands-on learning aspect is an important hallmark of the UniSC experience, giving students the opportunity to apply theory into practice in industry settings.
“Work-integrated learning opportunities not only give students like Rachel the opportunity to better hone their skills in areas they’re interested in, it ensures our graduates leave ready to start work in the industry of their choosing,” Professor Wilmore says.
“This is one of the reasons I’m proud to say that we’re highly rated when it comes to employer satisfaction.”
Rachel is particularly inspired by Australian women’s fashion brand fayt, which the emerging marketer says produces social media differently to many other brands.
What Rachel admires and applauds is the way fayt has created a positive, inclusive community that draws in consumers. They celebrate body positivity, by supporting and showcasing models with diverse skin tones and body types.
“The fayt team has a really interesting approach in that their content is not so much focused on the clothing but on their work culture, and the brand is integrated into that,” she explains.
“The content is less focused on pushing the product and more focused on celebrating the personality of the business, which gets its clothing noticed.”
While Rachel is still undecided as to whether she’d rather explore a marketing and social media career in sports, fashion or another industry, what she does know is she can always re-focus and specialise in another sector, if her first choice doesn’t work out.
Media enquiries: Please contact the Media Team media@usc.edu.au