How UTS develops job-ready innovators with Marlee

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The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is known for integrating real-world experiences and job-ready skills into its programs. To take this a step further, UTS embedded Marlee into its innovation and entrepreneurship curriculum, from deep tech accelerators to leadership mentoring. Using Marlee’s Motivational Analysis, UTS students, researchers, alumni, and partners gain powerful self-awareness, learn how to form stronger teams, and develop the human skills essential to thrive in the future of work.
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About UTS:

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is Australia’s leading technology university and ranks among the top 100 universities globally. With a diverse student body of more than 47,000, including 13,000 international students, UTS delivers industry-connected education. Through input from thousands of partners annually, UTS equips graduates with practical skills that translate into strong employment outcomes: more than 77% of undergraduates secure full-time work within four months of graduation (2024, UTS).

Industry: Tertiary Education
Website: https://www.uts.edu.au
Employees: 4,264 (2024, UTS)

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Challenges:

The future of work demands that engineers and IT professionals master more than just technical skills: they must also lead, collaborate, and build solutions in diverse, global teams. As these jobs increasingly involve complex systems design, robotics, AI, and cyber-physical technologies, universities need evidence-based ways to develop soft skills—which we prefer to call human skills—and entrepreneurial mindsets.

At UTS, Jeri Childers, PhD, then Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, led the initiative to find an evidence-based assessment that could underpin a capabilities framework for innovation and commercialization programs. Her goal was to focus on mindset development for innovation and entrepreneurship using a proven tool effective for individuals, teams, and organizational development.

Importantly, UTS needed a solution that could be applied not only in undergraduate pre-accelerator programs, but also with Masters and Doctoral students, alumni, and university partners to support the startup ecosystem.

The goal was clear: find a single tool that could scale leadership development and innovation capability for individuals and teams alike, while remaining valid across different stages of a professional journey, from student to alumni, to support job-ready skill building, career decision-making, entrepreneurship, and leadership growth.

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Solution:

UTS embedded Marlee into its curriculum across multiple programs: a new innovation sub-major, the Techcelerator (a pre-accelerator for deep tech prototyping), corporate training for alumni, and a Female Founder Mentoring program.

Through Marlee’s Motivational Analysis, students and teams were able to:

Visualise their communication and decision-making styles
Compare themselves to global success models in entrepreneurship
Identify blind spots and strengths relevant to venture success within the startup and scale up phases
Improve team dynamics and co-founder alignment to kickstart startups

Marlee became the foundation for mindset coaching and team collaboration, allowing UTS to integrate coaching directly into classroom delivery and startup initiatives.

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Results:

Students, staff, and industry partners using Marlee reported a deeper understanding of themselves as innovators and enterprising professionals. Marlee gave UTS the ability to offer leaders and founders a tool with insights to enable them to increase their innovation, commercialisation, and venture startup capabilities, while also supporting more confident, self-directed learning.

By embedding coaching into the classroom experience, UTS amplified the impact of each insight. Participants didn’t just receive a profile, they engaged in conversations that helped them link mindset to performance, build stronger teams, and navigate future roles with intention.

“One of the biggest challenges in building a business is managing and growing a team. I'm a mechanical and mechatronic engineer, so I can build really cool technology and come up with great ideas, but without a team, I'm not building anything. When I had a new team, I was asking: how do we actually work together? Using Marlee helped us understand how each of us prefers to work and communicate—it made a real difference.”
—Rowan Smith, Founder and CEO, Tech Gym (now Founder, Summit Strength)

Marlee also supported researchers and founders in combining technical, innovative, and enterprising mindsets for commercialisation. As a result, it became a foundational technology for developing leaders equipped to drive deep tech innovation and lead meaningful change.

“Marlee is opening a new door for how we engage in soft skill development. It’s a key that’s helping us unlock our future, together.”
—Jeri Childers, PhD, Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, UTS

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Future:

Future goals include developing case studies of the different uses for professional and venture development. UTS also plans to implement pre- and post-assessments to help students track their progress on individual learning goals.

With ongoing research collaboration with Marlee’s founder and CEO, Michelle Duval, UTS aims to explore how motivational data can support more tailored career navigation and improved venture readiness.

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Why Marlee:

Increases self-awareness and understanding of the human skills essential for leadership and venture success
Helps students and alumni recognise their unique talents and potential as innovators, building confidence in traits employers and investors value
Brings to life the power of diverse work styles in team dynamics, showing how to engage collaborators, stakeholders, and future teammates
Helps students build confidence by identifying and applying their strengths, while also developing new, enterprising mindsets to grow beyond their blind spots
Enables educators to embed coaching-style leadership into the learning experience, using data-driven conversations to support individual development and team effectiveness