The Wisdom Worker Effect: Bridging Students and Industry Professionals

This event brings together two groups with a shared but often misaligned interest: students and young professionals preparing to enter the IT workforce, and the Industry Professionals seeking to recruit and develop talent that delivers real organisational value.

Rather than a traditional careers fair or one-directional presentation format, this event is built as a mutual learning experience. Students and Industry Professionals each articulate their expectations of one another, explore the gap between those expectations, and then work together in mixed groups on realistic, pre-scripted problems — building genuine professional relationships along the way.

The audience mix is approximately 70% students and 30% Industry Professionals, keeping small-group discussion rich and well-facilitated without professional voices being diluted or overwhelmed.

The draft timetable for the day is:

Time Session

08:30 – 08:55 Registration and welcome

09:00 – 09:15 Opening: Purpose of the day, the Wisdom Worker concept, the expectation gap

09:15 – 09:30 Women in Tech Spotlight: A Wisdom Worker Journey

09:30 – 09:50 Industry panel: what we look for

10:00 – 10:30 Student panel: what we hope for

10:30 – 11:00 Break

11:00 – 12:00 Facilitated joint discussion / Q&A

12:00 – 12:15 Setup pods – potentially 5

12:15 – 13:15 Lunch and networking (mixed seating)

13:15 – 15:00 Workshops: mixed group problem-solving – introduce problem

15:00 – 15:15 Break

15:15 – 16:00 Group reporting and highlights (Slido)

16:00 – 16:30 Closing: Wisdom Worker recap, next steps, networking close