Preparing Students for the Digital Jobs of the Future: Reflections on a 5-year Digital Transformation Hackathon

Event Overview

What if the job you’re preparing for doesn’t exist today? As Information and Communication Technology (ICT) evolves in unpredictable ways, universities must prepare students for jobs involving technologies that may have not been invented yet. Industry, in turn, seeks graduates ready to thrive in this uncertain digital environment but often struggles finding them.

To address this challenge, we developed the ‘Digital Transformation Hackathon,’ a work-integrated teaching innovation launched in 2021 with technology-firm ORACLE. This five-week program has empowered more than 2,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students to tackle real societal challenges in Australia, including housing, homelessness, or climate change, using ORACLE technologies.

By working with real business needs, deadlines, and expectations, students gain an authentic learning experience that strengthens their creativity, teamwork, and public speaking skills. The hackathon bridges the gap between classroom learning and the workplace, equipping students with the skills they need to succeed in future digital workplaces.

Speaker Profiles

Christoph Breidbach is Associate Professor of Business Information Systems (BIS) at The University of Queensland, where he also leads the BIS Discipline and the UQ Service Innovation Alliance Research Hub. His empirical and conceptual research addresses fundamental questions of digital transformation in service settings, and he published over 50 peer-reviewed paper on topic in leading journals and conference proceedings. His most recent work explores the question of whether AI systems can develop consciousness, and what implications could arise from that for organisations and society. Dr Breidbach is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Information Systems, serves as Associate Editor for the Information Systems Journal and led the AIS Special Interest Group “Services” as elected President from 2018-2021.

Jason Lowe is Master Principal Cloud Architect at Oracle, where he leads the regional Cloud Engineering team focusing on Data Management. Since 2015, he has been a Thought Leader driving innovation through different engagements, including being a co-founder of Hacking Health QLD (a healthtech innovation community); collaborating with Hackmakers to deliver virtual worldwide hackathons that focused on Data Science, Machine Learning and Cyber Security with thousands of participants during COVID; and regular speaker and panellist at local and international events speaking on topics of Data, AI and other emerging technologies.