Case Study: UTS ready to grow Australia’s talent market

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) said it's prepping its students for the growing AI workforce as businesses increasingly invest and adopt emerging technology.

Professor Michael Blumenstein, Deputy Dean for the faculty of engineering and IT at UTS said he is helping accelerate AI education to help fill gaps in the job market.

“From a UTS perspective, we're very much a practice-oriented university. It's in our DNA to interface with industry and one of the things that was appealing for us around interface with AWS was the importance that was growing around cloud technologies”.

He added the AWS partnership “started with a dependency and a collaboration around cloud technology that was going to be integrated into our curriculum”.

“[This] also was going to be placed there for the benefit of our students to see what's happening as best practice in the industry, and therefore giving them the best opportunity to skill up around pathways that would enable them to get a good career and good jobs.”

“We needed to pivot around the cloud's benefits around being able to run large AI models, both for research and for teaching.”

Blumenstein explained it's important to ensure skills are multifaceted.

“The way it looks is that we are what you could call participants in the AWS Academy, but we have a specific subject that focuses on developing and deploying practical tools, enterprise-grade skills in the cloud and that's embedded in our degrees."

Awareness of emerging technology is leading to high rates of student demand, added Blumenstein.

“Having an industry partner involved creates the opportunity to augment awareness in an area.

“When we first started around the cloud it was still quite a novelty to be taught at the university.

"The awareness of both the requirements of using cloud technologies and the onset of AI because of its heavy reliance on the cloud has increased significantly, he explained.

“We have had a year-on-year growth in student demand and enrolments.”

The university has now introduced new degrees as part of its effort to upskill its students for the future work environment.

“In the end the successes that have been reaped through the computer science degree, which when I was the head of school, I helped design, has now resulted in us being able to start delivering a new bachelor of artificial intelligence, which commenced in 2023 and also a master of AI, which commenced in, in spring 2022.

“It's like a snowball effect the increase in awareness of AI and cloud, the collaboration and exposure to industry and industry curriculum in collaboration with academics and industry - which then spurred on more demand and therefore required us to deliver more programs to meet that demand.”

Blumenstein said student enrolments have experienced a five times growth for the bachelor of AI and a three times increase for the student enrolments in a master of AI.

He said the next steps include thinking of new education pathways for its students.

“We want to create that skilled workforce that … it is job ready.

“Let's face it. They are getting more exposure when they deal with industry opportunities in their studies and so what we will do is we're going to probably not proliferate more degrees, but rather, look at … reigniting the initial things we started doing and looking at what else we can do to enhance the curriculum and enhance the teaching side,” Blumenstein said.

He said for the remained of the year UTS will continue to look at ways to add value for its students “so that we can create the workforce that all these companies are asking for”.

“AI will potentially affect people's salaries. [ An Amazon.com study] released new research also talked about how 80 percent of the workers will expect having AI skills to have a positive impact on their careers.

“That is something that our students are very keenly aware of, that everything from millennial to Gen X - they're all very cognizant of that and the high stats that remain around people wanting to do work in AI,

“It illustrates there's a lot of interest and there will be for many years to come. We want to be part of that journey with AWS,” Blumenstein said.