- Research project
- – Western Pacific
by Lachlan Guthrie
Over the last month, Andre Taylor and I have redesigned and revitalised the IWC’s online team leadership course in preparation for the upcoming cohorts planned for May and August. We thought we would check in on two graduates from last year’s first cohort, Jessica and Elham, to see how their leadership journey was faring.
Jessica Bohorquez (pictured above) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide and an Advisor at Inside Infrastructure.
As an engineer, she found the introduction to leadership module most helpful. Understanding that there was a whole field of leadership theory out there has opened the door to a world of new possibilities to continue her learning. She has already brought some of these lessons back to work, running a session with her team on leadership. She has also brought the same learnings to Online Emerging Water Leaders from the Australian Water Association.
Since completing the course her role has changed to include more consulting and she is looking forward to applying what she learnt in the course and learning more as she begins to lead her own project teams.
“I found it helpful putting formal definitions to things that, as an engineer, I had not studied formally. Leadership is really important and something you don’t learn at uni”.
– Jessica Bohorquez
Elham Radaei is a Water and Wastewater team lead at KBR. Since completing the course, her role has included more leadership requirements.
The course helped her to better understand the nature and fundamentals of teams and she found the course peer-to-peer learning style attractive where most young water professionals discussed the same struggles and shared their experiences and solutions. She is looking forward to improving her leadership skills and learning by experiencing.
“I found Self-leadership helpful as there are a lot to be developed in ourselves that are effective in team leadership. Now I know leadership is a journey.”
– Elham Radaei
I think I speak for all the IWC team when I say that these stories are why we do the work that we do. We work by giving water professionals in Australia and abroad the tools they need to progress and succeed in their careers.
If you would like to know more about our online team leadership course, our other short courses, or any of our other work please have a look at the links below.
https://www.griffith.edu.au/engage/professional-learning/awa-leadership
https://www.watercentre.org/study/courses/?course_type=online-courses#filter
https://www.watercentre.org/
