The Professionalism Project

Role

Tools

Duration

Expertise

Me (Researcher/Designer) + 1 other Researcher, 3 Health Science Students, 2 Supervisors

FigJam
Canva
Cogniti AI
Canvas LMS

March 2024 - January 2025

Research & Analysis
Workshop Facilitation / Co-tutoring
Concept Ideation
Prototyping

Redefining Professional Skills in Health Sciences

What’s the problem?

The Professionalism Project, funded by University of Sydney’s Strategic Education Grants, is an initiative designed to embed professional skills learning throughout the health science curriculum, ensuring that students develop strong professional identities and behaviours from their first year through to graduation.

With an increasing number of complaints from clinical educators, professionalism breaches—including inappropriate social media use, poor communication, and unprofessional conduct in healthcare settings—have led to placement cancellations and the failure of student progression.

This project aims to seek the root cause of these concerns and developing ways to standardise and embed professionalism training across multiple disciplines.

Project Goals:

Following the 4 pillars of professionalism as briefed by our supervisors, our goal is to ensure students acquire relevant professionalism skills to enable a seamless transition into the workforce upon graduation. In turn, reducing the amount of students failing placement due to unprofessional conduct.

We also aim to support educators and academics by providing resources and strategy to support their professionalism teaching, enabling them to effectively address challenges related to student professionalism.

To really understand why professionalism has become such as large concern, we consulted both students and their teachers.

Doing our research

To design an impact-driven professionalism learning framework, we conducted extensive research, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to capture insights from students, educators, and faculty members. Our goal was to identify the barriers preventing students from developing professionalism skills and to create a solution that addresses real-world challenges.

From there, we began collecting primary research to learn more about the perceptions surrounding the topics of professionalism and the existing teaching strategies. We found a heavily disorganised scene.

Making sense of ALL of our data

We used thematic analysis to code the coordinator interviews and identified sub-themes and larger overarching themes. We then we used an affinity diagram to analyse the student interviews (shown below), using a bottom-up approach, we grouped individual quotations into larger categories by identifying common themes or patterns.

Meditating upon our insights, we asked:

How might we create an engaging and structured approach to professionalism teaching that equips health science students with the confidence to navigate real-world workplace interactions, digital professionalism, and interdisciplinary communication throughout their academic journey?

237

Survey Responses

… over 5 questionnaires, including an initial questionnaire to measure students’ perceptions of professionalism and challenges they face.

Here’s a snippet of our survey results:

2

Focus groups

… with unit coordinators and tutors to discuss real-world professionalism experiences, knowledge gaps, and learning preferences.

17

Semi-structured Interviews

… with Faculty of Medicine and Health members, including 9 health-science students and 8 course coordinators and faculty members to understand current professionalism teaching methods.

What did we find?

Currently, professionalism education is inconsistent across courses, often left to the discretion of individual educators rather than being systematically integrated. Student’s also have varying definitions and understandings of professionalism.

✅ Areas of High Confidence

  • Asking for help when unsure about their role as a future health professional.

  • Communicating professionally with clients and patients while on placement.

⚠️ Areas of Lower Confidence

  • Using social media professionally – indicating a need for clearer guidance on professional digital identity and boundaries.

  • Being prepared for class – suggesting that time management and professional responsibility could be better reinforced.

  • Communicating professionally with university teaching staff and other health professionals – highlighting the need for stronger interprofessional communication training.

What does this mean?

Our research identified 4 core insights reflecting the challenges affecting the development of professionalism skills in students and consequently, the opportunities areas we could leverage.

Ideation

Now that we have a better idea on the problem and opportunity areas , it was time to share and Co-design with our target users.

As one of the 2 design students in our team, we were in charge of guiding the the team through ideation. We decided it would be a good idea to run some Co-design workshops to get the ideas flowing ~ but, we had to make sure that that students and staff without a design background could participate effectively.

Our first ideation workshop focused on brainstorming and refining interactive learning activities for professionalism training in HSBH1003 tutorials.

  • Reverse Thinking – We explored how professionalism training might fail, then reversed those failures into positive design strategies.

  • Crazy 8’s – Participants sketched eight ideas in eight minutes, and sharing some their favourite ideas in a group discussion.

  • Storyboarding – After hearing everyone’s ideas, participants chose one idea to develop through storyboarding.

Here’s some of the concept sketches from the participants and I:

How did we decide?

After successfully gathering some potential ideas in Workshop 1, we decided to conduct a second Co-design workshop with 15 students and staff from a broad range of health science degrees to explore some more ideas.

For this workshop we used:

  • Mindmapping – Mapping out professionalism pain points, opportunity areas, and delivery modes.

  • Forced Association – Branching out of our Mindmap to rapidly gather some out of the box solutions.

  • Brainwriting – Participants built upon each other’s ideas in multiple rounds, refining concepts collectively

Here's some process work from a ~pretty~ intensive forced-association session.

After each of our workshops, the team reeled in to evaluate our potential solutions - which were sometimes completely out of the scope for our project. We evaluated the top ideas from both workshops using a 12-point Pugh matrix, using a list of criteria pulled from our insights and considered the feasibility to progress forward with them. Here is the decision matrix used to evaluate the solutions from our first workshop:

We knew our solutions should promote greater professionalism learning, but how were we going to get the most unengaged students to engage?

Our final solutions

After identifying key gaps in professionalism education, we developed a suite of solutions aimed at making professionalism training engaging, accessible, and applicable to all students, regardless of their schedule, preferred method of learning or confidence in class engagement.

This includes:

  • 3 in-class learning activities

  • A suite of professionalism AI chatbots

  • A professionalism skills matrix, along with updated Learning Outcomes.

Lets break it down.

In semester 1, to ensure real-world application, we co-designed 3 interactive activities along with supporting in-class resources that encourage experiential learning. Leveraging peer-to-peer learning, self-reflection and a a broad range of scenarios to provide relevance to their careers.

Here is an example of a in-class workshop we ran with 80+ second year Physiotherapy students.

In semester 2, to engage the group of students who may be less likely to engage in-class, we co-designed tools that enable self-guided, accessibility and multi-modal learning, self-reflection. We integrated these tools in various health science units.

After taking a few Cogniti run courses on how to create AI agents, we leveraged this university-integrated generative AI platform to create 4 specialised “Professionalism Chatbots”. Built upon relevant and reliable University resources (such as the USYD careers centre articles) to reduce biases, these chatbots help students navigate various different aspects of professionalism. These are accessible to students anywhere, anytime.

To support educators, a set of updated Learning Outcomes and the “Professionalism Matrix” provides a structured framework defining professionalism competencies across soft, technical, and ethical skills to provide:

  • A unified definition of professionalism for both students and educators.

  • A benchmarking tool for tracking professionalism growth throughout the degree.

  • A self-assessment resource for students to identify strengths and areas for improvement.

In theory our solutions sounded promising, but before handing them off to the staff members, we needed to put our assumptions to the test.

Evaluating our deliverables

In Semester 1, our early deliverables—such as professionalism tutorials and discussion-based activities—were successfully delivered to over 150+ health science students across 2 core health science units. After delivering our lessons and asked the students and tutors for their feedback, this is what they said:

Building on this, our focus in Semester 2 was to expand the reach of professionalism initiatives into a broader range of units. We achieved this by turning to digital tools, reusable resources and asynchronous methods of delivery. We integrated 2 of our chabots and asked for student and staff feedback:

After getting some good intial feedback from these integrations, we conducted 3 guided user-testing workshops with 12 health science students, followed by a survey with 28 additional students.

Testing Methods

  • Task-Based Testing: Students engaged with the chatbots and professionalism tools in realistic learning scenarios.

  • Pre/Post-Test Interviews & Questionnaires: To assess students’ perceptions, improvements, and engagement levels.

  • Usability Analysis: Gathering insights into chatbot response accuracy, ease of use, and relevance.

Results

Cover Letter Writing Chatbot (3 users)
✔ Increased confidence in cover letter quality → 4.33/5 rating.

Job Interview Chatbot (5 users)
✔ Helpfulness for improving interview skills → 4.33/5 rating.

Professionalism Skills & FAQs Chatbot (4 users)
✔ Usefulness of chatbot suggestions → 4.67/5 rating.
✔ 83% of students said it "Definitely" increased their understanding of professional behavior.
✔ Relevance to their area of study → 4.17/5 rating.

HBSH2009 (Innovations in eHealth)

  • We worked with the educator to modify our Cover Letter Writing Chatbots to support her letter writing tutorial excerise. TheChatbot was trained on assignment rubrics to tailor responses to course-specific learning objectives.

  • Educator Feedback: The chatbot was useful, but needed more structured feedback rather than rewriting student responses

MRTY2108 (Radiography Work Integrated Learning 2)

  • The Professionalism FAQs Chatbot was made asynchronously available on Canvas for students preparing for placement-intensive sessions.

  • Student Feedback: Students found the chatbot helpful in clarifying placement expectations, with many surprised by how fact-based and formally AI-generated responses were structured.

Impact and Future Work

The Professionalism Project successfully introduced scalable, interactive learning tools to enhance professionalism education. Our two-hour handover workshop to staff received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with many educators booking consultations to explore integration into their courses.

Following this, we distributed handoff packages, including user guides, implementation strategies, and technical documentation, ensuring seamless adoption.

This project has laid the foundation for sustained curriculum integration, equipping both educators and students with practical, real-world professionalism training that will evolve with future cohorts.

P.S. We won an award!

Key Learnings

Reflections

The Professionalism Project was an exercise in adaptability, leadership, and collaboration, reinforcing the reality that designing impactful solutions isn’t always a linear process. Unlike structured coursework, this project taught me that sometimes supervisors don’t have all the answers, and progress depends on taking initiative. At multiple points, we had to proactively shape the direction of the project, making key decisions to keep things moving while ensuring alignment with stakeholder expectations.

One of the biggest challenges was managing scope within budget constraints, requiring strategic prioritisation of deliverables. While co-design sessions generated ambitious ideas, not all were feasible. The challenge was to harness creative energy while keeping solutions practical and implementable—a delicate balance between innovation and real-world constraints.

Facilitating workshops with students and staff was another key learning moment. Engagement isn’t automatic; it requires intentional structure, well-framed prompts, and iterative refinement of facilitation techniques to ensure meaningful participation. These workshops underscored the power of co-design, proving that user-driven insights lead to richer, more relevant solutions.

Another critical lesson was interdisciplinary communication—translating the design process to non-designers. Many team members from the Faculty of Medicine and Helath were unfamiliar with human-centered design methods. Clearly articulating why we were using iterative prototyping, user testing, and scenario-based design was essential.

This project reaffirmed the importance of flexibility, leadership, and the ability to bridge disciplines. It was a reminder that design isn’t just about creating—it’s about facilitating, communicating, and making strategic decisions to drive meaningful change.

~ Serena