With more than 21,000 co-op students across six faculties, and 7,100 employers in more than 60 countries, the University of Waterloo is recognized as one of the pre-eminent institutions in co-operative education. It’s a designation that we carry with pride that closely relates to the work we do each day.
Our insights from the 2018/19 fiscal year show that Waterloo’s co-op program helps us remain a global leader in the field of work-integrated learning. It’s also one of the top influencing factors in student enrolment, alongside our strong academic reputation.
Our 2018 – 2019 fiscal year saw co-op enrolment top 22,400 full-time undergraduate students. This is a 17% per cent increase since 2014. While we implemented a new model to calculate employment rates, we reached an impressive 97.6% employment rate in Fall 2019, facilitating more than 21,800 work terms throughout the year. Our international presence has continued to grow over the last year too, with 3,200 international work terms (an increase of 37.4% per cent since 2014, including work terms facilitated in the US).
With a program of this size, Co-operative Education strives to explore our process, resources and supports to improve student wellness by working with the Co-op Student Experience Advisory Group and participating in more on-campus wellness initiatives. In 2019, this meant strengthening mental health resources through staff training and connection to campus wellness resources. We also partnered with the campus safety office to update workplace safety resources and supports for students, and we expanded staff expertise on workplace harassment through resources and supports by collaborating with the Office of Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion. We hope these efforts set the stage for ongoing emphasis on student wellness and belonging throughout 2020.
As we continue to expand our webcam and phone interview options, we’re enabling students and employers to participate in more co-op interviews than ever before. Between 2018 and 2019, we reached a record high of more than 99,000 job interviews, conducted on and off campus. Many of these interviews took place in the Tatham Centre, which very much remains the heart of co-op at Waterloo. It’s a facility that fosters the employer-student connections that add value to our program for students and employers – including 1,500 new employers who hired over the last 12 months.
Our program cannot make this much impact without the hard work and dedication of our staff working behind the scenes, processing over 1.2 million job applications and supporting more than 63,000 in-person interviews. On the frontline, our Information Centre and Help Desk teams helped students, employers and staff by arranging more than 52,000 interactions during our last fiscal year. This dedicated team came to work on days we experienced school closures due to inclement weather, ensuring that our students and employers received the support they needed.
We are grateful for the continuous feedback and input we receive from our faculties as well, who help us ensure a variety of program developments and enhancements each year. Our teams look forward to ongoing collaboration and partnership with our faculties in the coming year.
Waterloo’s success in the field of experiential learning also thrives due to the work of the Centre for Career Action (CCA). Over 17,000 members of our community (including students and staff) have engaged with career-specific online content through CCA’s CareerHub. CCA staff also supported 4,800 students through individual career advising sessions, providing résumé critiques, mock interviews, social media profile advice and job search tactics and guidance. In addition, CCA helped numbers of students to strategize on how to find a co-op experience, as well as reflect on their experiences, identify and articulate their skills, and translate their learnings into meaningful goals and action. The Centre for Career Action has also been a strategic partner in continuously enhancing the accessibility of co-op services and infrastructure and in driving co-op-related innovations inside and outside the classroom.
Our co-op graduates develop the most in-demand skills for the uncertain future of work. In the face of climate change, globalization, technological advancements, disruption and shifting economic and political landscapes, students must be adaptive and resilient as they prepare to enter the workforce. Through courses provided by the Waterloo Professional Development Program (WatPD), students are able to learn how to develop soft skills for different settings and successfully equip themselves with an arsenal of future-ready talents. There are presently 20,800 students enrolled in WatPD courses, learning how to build relationships, create solutions, reflect on their experiences and adopt new disciplines and skillsets they can use throughout their careers.
Another incredibly influential collaborator contributing to our success this year is The Waterloo Centre for the Advancement of Co-operative Education (WatCACE). In 2018/19, roughly 3,700 people have participated in WatCACE in research related to co-op – resulting in incredible data insights that helped inform a new digital guide titled, “Are You Ready to Manage the Workforce of the Future?”
Waterloo was founded on the innovation of co-operative education over 60 years ago, and today, is recognized as Canada’s most innovative university for 28 years in a row. We are the #1 university in Canada for employer-student connections. After six decades of expertise-building, post-secondary institutions from around the world continue to come to Waterloo for guidance on how to future-proof their programming to incorporate quality, intense work-integrated learning models that complement their academic offerings. With an innovative mindset combined with years of experience and a large student and industry network, it’s an honour for us to publicly acknowledge what makes our co-op program so unique.
I am pleased to share with you the full 2019 Co-operative Education Annual Report.
Ross Johnston
Executive Director, Co-operative Education
