A Holistic Reimagining of the Student Journey

• Every semester, RMIT contacts Master of Commerce students who are still undecided about study preferences and offers them guidance on how various choices translate into career options.
• Meeting with program managers, students have reflective conversations that help them build their confidence, refine their aspirations, and align their study decisions with long-term goals.
• The redesigned curriculum was co-created with industry stakeholders and incorporates real-world projects that improve students’ employability, adaptability, and critical thinking skills.

 
Postgraduate education is at a turning point. Today’s students expect programs that are delivered in flexible formats, align with personal passions, and offer pathways to meaningful careers. Just as importantly, they seek practical, hands-on learning that prepares them for real-world challenges, makes them feel like part of a learning community, and helps them build personal and professional networks. In other words, they want programs that enable them to invest in their future selves.

Meanwhile, employers are looking for graduates who are both knowledgeable and adaptable. They want new hires who can solve complex problems, work across disciplines, and thrive in rapidly changing industries.

Yet traditional models of higher education fall short of meeting both student and employer expectations. Program structures remain rigid, student support is fragmented, and critical conversations about career options are left too late. These realities create a mismatch between what students need and what institutions provide. If education remains an assembly line of courses, students very well could graduate from college possessing the knowledge but not the confidence, networks, or tools they need to transition successfully into the workforce.

This raises a central challenge for universities: How can we design postgraduate programs that go beyond content delivery to nurture capable, career-ready professionals?

A Life Cycle Approach to Program Design

At the College of Business and Law at RMIT University in Melbourne, we have answered this question by redesigning our Master of Commerce degree. One of the most critical elements of our new program is its holistic, life cycle approach to the postgraduate learning experience in which we embed touchpoints into every stage of the educational journey.

This means that, after each semester, instead of leaving learners to navigate in isolation, we offer structured opportunities for alignment, reflection, and growth:

• Advising and mentoring opportunities keep students accountable and make them feel supported.
• Personalized course planning ensures their passions and strengths shape their academic paths.
• Early and frequent career conversations prevent last-minute anxiety and build professional confidence from the start.
• Wraparound support integrates academic, well-being, and employability services, recognizing that students thrive when they are supported on all fronts.

Our new program takes a holistic, life cycle approach to the postgraduate learning experience in which we embed touchpoints into every stage of the educational journey.

These interventions are grounded in four teaching and learning philosophies:

• Constructivism, which positions learners as active agents who build knowledge through engagement and reflection.
• Andragogy, which acknowledges the needs of adult learners for relevant, flexible programming that enables their autonomy.
• Experiential learning, which ties theory to practice through capstone projects, simulations, and industry engagement.
• Connectivism, which equips students with digital literacy and networking skills by curating digital portfolios that showcase their projects and competencies.

Together, these teaching and  learning philosophies change the student journey from transactional to transformational. Students not only gain subject mastery, but also develop the resilience, adaptability, and sense of professional identity they need to succeed in an evolving world of work.

A Closer Look at the Student’s Journey

Here’s how it works. We know that choosing a study pathway is one of the most challenging decisions that students face, and it often requires academic and career-focused guidance beyond routine administrative support. Therefore, we provide students with multiple rounds of personalized guidance designed to support both undecided learners and those who discover their initial choice does not align with their evolving interests or strengths.

Personalized guidance begins after students complete their core courses in their first semester, typically a few weeks before the semester ends, and continues each semester through to graduation. Each round of guidance builds on the last.

In the initial round, we help students reflect on their core subjects, clarify interests, and map out suitable options for the next semester. We first review how many learners are still undecided on their majors and minors—in 2025, for example, that included 49 percent of our students. We invite these undecided students to attend online sessions in which we describe the school’s three majors and nine minors and introduce them to the career pathways each option enables. We record sessions for students who are unable to attend and provide clear guidance on what to do next if they require further support.

We encourage students to ask questions during these sessions and, when possible, we answer them in real time. If questions cannot be answered immediately, we follow up through individual online meetings or email exchanges, depending on the students’ preferences. While the program manager leads the general guidance sessions, discipline leads provide additional expertise when more specialized advice is needed.

In addition, if students require additional support, we encourage them to engage directly with the program manager. Some students reach out for help proactively during the course of the semester; others only interact when we contact them.

These reflective conversations help students build their confidence, strengthen their motivation, clarify their strengths, refine their aspirations, and keep study decisions aligned with long-term goals.

In the second round of guidance sessions, we give more tailored advice as we consider each student’s emerging strengths, preferred pathways, and early career goals. In the later rounds, we shift our focus to capstone courses, work-integrated learning opportunities (where relevant), and plans for what happens after graduation.

These touchpoint sessions are not intended to monitor grades. Instead, they focus on helping students make informed decisions about choosing majors and minors that align with their life and career goals.

We find it especially valuable to offer this support to students who enter the program intending to change jobs. They sometimes are overwhelmed by the breadth of options available and unsure which choices offer the best career paths. For instance, if a marketing major is also interested in data, the program manager might suggest that the student minor in business analytics. Such a combination blends creative insight with data-driven capabilities, improving the student’s employability.

These recurring sessions are more than just procedural check-ins; they are reflective conversations that help students build their confidence, strengthen their motivation, clarify their strengths, refine their aspirations, and keep study decisions aligned with long-term goals and emerging industry opportunities. The conversations also foster a sense of belonging, ensuring that students feel recognized as developing professionals.

By embedding touchpoints across the program, RMIT reinforces a holistic life cycle approach that supports learners from the first day of class through graduation, providing graduates an understanding of how to plan their educational journeys and advance their careers.

A Revamped Program Structure

In addition to integrating touchpoints throughout the Master of Commerce degree, we make certain the new program reflects the realities of contemporary work. The curriculum was co-designed by industry and academic stakeholders and emphasizes employability, critical thinking, and adaptability. Key features of the redesigned program include:

• Foundation courses. Such courses provide all students with a shared base of knowledge, ensuring equitable starting points for diverse learners.
• A range of majors and minors. The majors include business analytics, international business, and the digital economy. The nine minors are selected from across the College of Business and Law, as well as the university. This wide array of choices promotes interdisciplinary breadth and enables students to follow personalized study pathways.
• A global mindset. We want our graduates to think beyond borders and align their careers with issues of global significance. For instance, because sustainability has become an important topic in business, we integrate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into our curriculum.
• Industry-designed capstone projects. Developed with partners such as ANZ, DiDi, Toll, and Microsoft, these projects immerse students in real-world problem-solving activities that build confidence, capability, and career readiness. Each semester, the top four student teams present their solutions to industry panels. Such interactions offer networking opportunities and often lead to work placements.
• Professional placement options such as internships. Combined with the capstone projects, these experiences provide students with structured pathways for gaining industry experience. By giving students opportunities to bridge classroom learning with professional application, these experiences prepare students to make an immediate impact in the workplace.

Underpinning the program design is a robust assurance of learning (AoL) framework built around RMIT’s Authentic, Applied, and Adaptive (AAA) design principles. The framework measures how each student has grown in authenticity through reflective learning assignments, in applied competence through work-integrated assessments, and in adaptability through innovation-focused projects. Each course is embedded with clear AoL indicators, signposted through hashtags in assessment rubrics, enabling students to recognize, track, and reflect on their development.

When education is coherent, flexible, personally meaningful, and supported by holistic touchpoints, students graduate with confidence, resilience, and a clear sense of direction.

For example, in Intelligent Enterprise Systems, the assessment hashtags include #AoL6 (critically engaged) and #AoL4 (digitally adept). We assess students on their ability to articulate key business and technical problem statements, justify these statements with clear rationales, propose realistic project timelines, and outline business process improvements using design thinking. We also require them to compare and critically evaluate two enterprise systems and relevant intelligent technologies for a chosen organization. Students earn higher grades when they display stronger critical reasoning skills, evaluative depth, and an ability to integrate digital capabilities.

This transparent approach makes learning outcomes visible and enables students to see how each assessment contributes to their overall professional growth across the program life cycle.

The Master of Commerce program began with 49 students in 2024 and has grown to 96 students in 2025, reflecting strong demand for our integrated, future-focused, job-ready approach.

Lessons Learned and the Path Ahead

As we have implemented our redesigned program, we have come to an important realization: When education is coherent, flexible, personally meaningful, and supported by holistic touchpoints, students don’t just finish their degrees. They also graduate with confidence, resilience, and a clear sense of direction. They are better prepared to navigate uncertainty, pivot across industries, and lead in a global context.

This means that, as business schools design new programs, they can no longer stop at content delivery. They need to embrace the full student life cycle. They must cover the newest critical topics, such as digital literacy and sustainability; but they also must help students maintain their well-being, enhance their employability, and build their professional identities. In a world defined by automation, disruption, and rapid change, this kind of scaffolding is no longer optional—it is essential.

At present, the touchpoint system has only been deployed in RMIT’s Master of Commerce program. Adoption of the system is at the discretion of individual program teams, and we hope our success will inspire broader interest. We believe it could be particularly useful for programs that not only teach skills but also help students cultivate a sense of purpose, because it prepares graduates for careers that will evolve across industries and borders.

In today’s landscape, a school’s success will be measured not only by how many students graduate, but by how many graduates thrive, innovate, and make meaningful contributions to business and society. That metric becomes even more essential in a digital, sustainable, and globally connected world.