Business Research Assignment: Factors Influencing Career Interests At Metro Trains Melbourne

Question

Task Description: Please provide an outline of a research project that you intend to use as the basis for your final assessment task 3, full project proposal. You should briefly write:

• Title of the project
• A brief statement of the problem that you would like to investigate; and research aim and objectives that can solve the problem you have identified
• A brief methodology: Provide details about what type of methodology you will choose such as quantitative or qualitative or mixed methodology
• Clearly identify secondary data source(s) and data that require for your research; also identify the methods and tools that you will use to analyse the collected data.

This is an individual research task. As a Masters student, you are required to engage in research and demonstrate your understanding of the relevant body of works that have discussed recent developments in a discipline and/or area of professional practice. You are also required to demonstrate knowledge of research methods applicable to a real-life business research. We expect you to read and reflect on at least ten recent refereed journal articles on your topic supported by any other evidence or information that can help identify the problem of your research and the methods of data collection and analysis.

In addition, as a part of topic presentation, all on-campus students are required to discuss their project topic and available secondary data during the tutorial sessions in front of other students. You are also expected to provide constructive feedback on each of the group members' project. Distance students will do the same activity in the online discussion forum of the unit Moodie site. Please see detailed guidelines about the topic and data presentation and specific research requirements on the unit Moodie site. You can write 600 words maximum for this assignment. The cover page and the list of references are not counted in the word limit.

Answer

1.0 Introduction
The rail industry in Australia is mainly dominated by male employees. Women employees comprises only 18% of the existing workforce. The participation of women in the rail industry is far behind the Australian national average of 47% representation of women in the total workforce of the country. Private rail companies in Australia are facing different problems for less female representation in rail industry. In this business research assignment Business Factors affecting female career interests in the rail industry in Australia is analyzed.

2.0 Brief statement of the problem
2.1 Research rationale: Metro Trains Melbourne is a private company providing sub urban rail services to the people of Victoria in Australia. According to Jones & Southcombe (2015), the organization has a policy to encourage women to take up a career in the organization. The number of female applicants is alarmingly low and have a negative impact on the long-term employee planning strategy of the organisation. Metro Trains Melbourne is looking for some innovative strategies to increase the participation of women specially in the engineering and operations department of the organisation. The basic purpose to select the research topic is to find the solutions of the problems faced by MTM and build an effective employee strategy.

2.2 Research aim: The aim of the business research assignment is to investigate the reasons behind the less representation of women in the Australian rail industry and investigate the importance of women representation on the overall performance of Metro trains Melbourne as per Doody & Bailey(2016)

2.3 Research objective: The objective of this business research assignment to determine,

• The recent participation of women in the Australian rail industry
• The benefit of women’s participation in the workforce of metro Train Melbourne
• The factors responsible for lower representations of women in the rain industry
• Effective strategies to increase the participation of women in Metro trains Melbourne’s workforce.

3.0 Research Methodology:
Research Onion:

Figure 1: Research Onion
(Source: Scott & Garner, 2013)

Positivism is chosen as Research philosophy because it will help to analyses the reason behind the less representation of women in MTM and its’ impact on employee strategy development.

Deductive Research Approach is used by the researcher to build employee strategy with the help of relevant information in business research assignment. According to Creswell & Creswell (2017), exploratory Research design is used here to acknowledge the ideas relevant to the research topic.

Data is a collection of useful information to analyses the research topic and derived effective solutions of the research problem. In this particular research the secondary data is collected from the website of Metro trains Melbourne. Secondary data is also collected from the Government of Victoria in order to analyses the research problem.

Qualitative technique is used to interview two managers of Metro trains Melbourne, one of them representing the engineering section and the other one representing the operations section. Five female employees from the above mentioned sections are also interviewed by the researcher. The researcher tried to maintain the Research ethics properly. The research is scheduled to be completed within 6 weeks and the Research budget is 200 Australian dollars.

4.0 Secondary data sources with it’s analyzing tool
4.1 Secondary data sources: The researcher has collected the secondary data from the Government of Victoria and from the online database of Metro Trance Melbourne. The data collected from the annual report of the organisation from website can be categorised as:

• Employee demography of the organisation
• Flexibility at workplace And working schedule
• Data relating to occupational health and safety measurement

4.2 Data analysing tool: The collected data is tabulated in the Excel sheet and correlation analysis is performed to find the type of relationship shared between one variable safety and flexibility with the other variable gender and age group.

5.0 Conclusion
The researcher has tried her best in this business research assignment to accumulate relevant information about the female participation in the workforce of MTM and also the reasons behind less participation of women employees in the rail industry as opined by Newman, Kenworthy & Glazebrook (2013). Analysing the collected data the researcher has established the relation between different factors responsible for the minimum participation of women in the workforce. The research findings has helped MTM to develop their employee strategy in order to increase female participation in the organisation which will help them to attain better performance.

References
Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2017). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications.

Doody, O., & Bailey, M. E. (2016). Setting a research question, aim and objective. Nurse researcher, 23(4).

Jones, M., & Southcombe, J. (2015). Track condition monitoring using service trains. In AusRAIL PLUS 2015, Doing it Smarter. People, Power, Performance, 24-26 November 2015, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Lückerath, D., Ullrich, O., & Speckenmeyer, E. (2013). Applicability of rescheduling strategies in tram networks. Proceedings of ASIMWorkshop STS/GMMS 2013.

Newman, P., Kenworthy, J., & Glazebrook, G. (2013). Peak car use and the rise of global rail: why this is happening and what it means for large and small cities. Journal of Transportation Technologies, 3.