Professor Peter Ralph

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which the university stands, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I’d also like to acknowledge the presiding Chancellor, Professor Brian Wilson; the presiding Vice Chancellor, Andrew Parfitt; presiding Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and IT, Associate Professor Rob Jarman; presiding Dean of the Faculty of Science, Associate Professor Peter Myer; presiding Director, Christine Burns; staff of the faculty; distinguished guests; and of course, the people that we’re really here for today, the graduates. 

Today is your day. You’ve made it, and you should really feel proud of your massive achievement. Equally, to all of the family, you have contributed massively to their goals and achievements as well. For me, it’s amazing standing here today. Thirty years ago, I was in the Great Hall graduating with my degree. At that time, I don’t quite recall how the event went, but I certainly remember it was awkward wearing the academic gown. Things haven’t changed. And I listened to an elderly person give us guidance about our future careers. 

It’s now my turn to try and provide you with some guidance for your careers. Now, in my job, I sit on a lot of selection panels for staff and postgraduates. And I’m increasingly aware of a lot of people coming with exceptionally good technical experience, as you all have. But the other part of what we’re looking for is their personal skills and how that makes them contribute to the organisation with meaningful and positive and impact on the organisation. 

Now, looking around the Great Hall today, I can see there’s no shortage of gifted graduates, but it’s more in these selection panels that we find people with well-developed interpersonal skills or people skills, and they both stand out in the interviews, and they also give a greater impact to the organisation. 

So, today, I want to talk about people skills. People skills are about relations. They’re more than knowing how to schmooze. In developing the ability to effectively communicate, to contribute and appreciate others. Many of these skills you’re going to learn on the job; other skills you’re going to learn through your life. No matter how you do it, building your personal skills are going to be an important contribution to a very successful career. 

Along with all of these people skills, I want to make three suggestions today that are going to help you in the next steps of your career. The first one is to be an effective team player, the second one is the find a mentor, and the third is to understand what motivates you. So, let’s run through them one at a time. Being an effective team player: successful organisations, whether it’s a university, multinational organisation, small medium enterprise, a start-up company, even a government, these organisations are transformed by great ideas. 

But to implement a great idea, you need to have a team of people, they need to have complementary skills, and they need to have a combined vision. Now, great ideas aren’t rare, but the implementation of great ideas is a challenge that requires highly skilled teams with effective management and leadership. Management and leadership are two distinct roles in a team which are not interchangeable. Managers provide control and are tactical. Leaders provide vision and they’re strategic. The simple way to see the difference between the two of them: a manager knows how to climb a mountain; a leader knows which mountain to climb. Now, effective teams need both managers and leaders. Lots of people want to become leaders, but without realising that in practice, leadership is predominantly service. 

Now, it’s service to the team and service to the organisation. It’s not about wielding power and authority to enforce your vision. An effective leader invests their time in growing the team and supporting their abilities. Of course, you can be an effective team member without being a manager or leader, but it’s important to understand where your best functioning is within the team and to play to that ability. Now, as you’re just starting out in your careers, I strongly encourage you to practise your leadership skills. 

Now, this can be done in a small group at work or even a sporting club. Give yourself the chance to test your boundaries. You’ll never know when an organisation is going to give you the opportunity to look for leadership, because organisations only need about 10 per cent of their staff to be leaders, but these opportunities are few and far between. Now, who do I have to thank for the opportunities that’s allowed me to become a leader of a research institute at UTS? My mentors. So that’s the second point that I want to bring up: getting a mentor early in your career. Mentors are people who can guide your development. Mentors facilitate things – they can open doors for jobs, they can be a sounding board, they can provide strategic guidance, but they can be different people at different times for different topics. A mentor isn’t always an older person from the same discipline that you’re in. They could be an aunt or uncle, they could be a colleague down the street, they could also be a colleague working at the university with you. They’re somebody that you can trust, they’re somebody that’s seen more in life, they’ve made mistakes, but more importantly they’ve worked out how to fix those mistakes. Don’t be shy about approaching somebody that you respect to support you as a mentor. All it takes is a simple email, you can approach them at an event or you can invite them for a cup of coffee. Most people are usually flattered to be a mentor. Just remember to use their time wisely, because these people don’t seek reward for their job and what they’re providing to you. 

Now, taking the time to fine-tune your people skills, to seek the right guidance, it takes a lot of time and a lot of understanding about yourself. And why would you bother doing this unless you were passionate and driven about what your job was going to be? If you want to build a career as opposed to committing to a job, then finding what drives your passion is going to be incredibly important to focus your career. 

That brings me to the third point: understanding what motivates you. You can simply ask yourself this question: what gets me out of bed in the morning? It might be money, it might be making a difference to society, it might be the discovery of a new process, it might be doing something that your mates aren’t able to do, but understanding what drives your career is going to be key to a satisfying and successful career. At school, I was good at maths and I enjoyed the early computers, but my real passion was to understand how to prevent environmental collapse, and so I chose to complete a degree in environmental biology. When I graduated, there were few jobs in that field, so I became a computer programmer, as many of you will. I earned a good salary, and after about 5-6 years, I was burnt out and I realised I wasn’t following my passion, so I took a job in biological sciences. I also enrolled in a part-time PhD. I was working about 70 hours a week and I was earning about a third of the salary that I was before, but I’d gotten my passion back. I’d redirected my career to something that was driving me. It took me six years to get my PhD, and then I spent the next 15 years monitoring and predicting how climate change was altering ecosystems, whether that’s the loss of seagrasses, coral bleaching, loss of sea ice in Antarctica. But I realised what I was doing – I was just measuring the degradation and death of these ecosystems. What I really wanted to do was solve the problem and restore those ecosystems. Fast forward to the present, now I’m working on how to shift industries and to use algae as a raw material for these industries. This can strip C02 out of the atmosphere and reduce climate change. This excites me. I can see that that algal bio-economy is going to blossom and transform how society functions. Future generations can watch the slow recovery of these degraded systems. It won’t happen in my lifetime. 

So, you can see over time, I’ve been able to redirect my career to follow my passion, and my more recent achievements are going to be my most proud. When you build your career, it’s important you know what drives you, because as with life, all of the struggles, it’s going to be easier to encounter and overcome, and also the rewards will be more real. So, if you do decide to embark on a career, make sure you direct it to your passion. You get a mentor early in your career, and learn how to contribute to a team. So, in closing, be proud of what you’ve achieved so far. I certainly hope my suggestions are useful, and good luck with accomplishing your goals in the future. Thank you.