''The door is now half open'': How work placement experience better prepares planning graduates for practice - an Australian case study

This chapter reports on how work placements assist graduates make more successful transitions to professional practice. Paid Work Placements tied to classroom discussions on planning theory and ethics were pioneered by Urban Planning at RMIT in the early 1980s. Graduates interviewed for this chapter appreciate how placements prepared them for the rigours, sometimes the disappointments of the first years of full-time practice. But they equally value, now as senior planners, their immersion in classroom debates about politics, economics and sociology, both before and after their placements. Ten or twenty years on, they speak of how such debates and written defences of their position assisted them becoming both more theoretically grounded and effective in their practices.