CQUniversity PhD student Nadia O'Connell has chosen a great time to present her latest research on the motivation of recruitment agents involved in international education...

With Australia acknowledged as a leader in agent-based recruitment, gleaning over 50% of its students this way to create our third biggest export industry, Europe and the United States are now taking up this model and are seeking guidance about best-practice.

LINK FOR CQUni among 384 institutions at Europe's international education conference

PhD student Nadia O'Connell and Adjunct Professor Debbie Clayton with their well-received poster presentation

Hence, Nadia's research around relationship-building has been well received. In essence, it recommends taking on fewer agents, but servicing them better through training and appropriate merchandising.

Once a staff member in CQUniversity's international office, Nadia is now based in Indonesia where she runs her own consulting company specialising in agent management.

Her PhD research is being supervised by Dr Ho Yin Wong, Senior Lecturer Marketing (main) and Professor Debbie Clayton, Adjunct Faculty Arts, Business, Informatics and Education (secondary).

Most recently, Nadia's been participating in the recent European Association International Education Conference at Nantes in France (Sept 15-18). EAIE is the single most important exhibition and conference in Europe for international education.

Nadia with Julian Longbottom who heads IDP's Marketing and Research Division

In conjunction with Professor Clayton, Nadia presented a well-received poster on 'Managing and motivating education agents to recruit our international students', one of only 21 chosen for the event.

"Participants from Europe and the USA in particular, were very interested in this research as many of these institutions are just starting to use education agents for recruitment purposes," Nadia said.

Professor Clayton said Australia leads the world in experience and best-practice systems for managing education agents.

"This is unique research by CQUniversity, as most past engagement in this area had been practitioner-based. The international education industry will welcome the findings of Nadia's work," she said.

Nadia was encouraged by one of the Editors of the Journal of Studies in International Education to contribute her work. She was also invited to be part of a proposal for a multi-country panel on education agents (including Australia and Europe) for next year's conference.

Julian Longbottom heads IDP's Marketing and Research Division (IDP has recruited over 300,000 students to Australia since its inception) and he was particularly interested in Nadia's work.