Mike Keating hails originally from Newcastle, his early background was predominantly in sport, recreation, and tourism roles including sports coaching, management and adventure tour guiding before moving into education in 2005. For the past 15 years he has been working as a formal educator within the Australian education system as an academic and manager.
He completed a Bachelor of Social Science (Recreation & Tourism) degree through the University of Newcastle in 2002, where he majored in recreation and tourism studies. He then completed an Honours degree in Recreation and Tourism by thesis in 2003. In 2005 he was recruited to a position as a university lecturer at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE) in the Northern Territory as the Sport and Recreation Course Coordinator.
He left BIITE in mid-2008 and joined the Australian Pacific Technical College (APTC) based in Vanuatu as the Tourism Course Coordinator, working for Boxhill TAFE.
His speciality area was tourism management and tour guiding. During 2008 he completed a Master in Adult Education degree at the University of Technology, Sydney where he developed his skills as an adult educator and manager of education programs to a higher level.
At the end of 2010 he returned to Australia and in early 2011 he briefly worked for the Blue Mountains International Hospitality Management School (BMIHMS), delivering the research unit in their Hospitality Management degree course. For most of 2011 he worked for Hunter Community College (HCC) in Newcastle, NSW as a VET Education Consultant and also delivered VET Diploma in Business units for Advanced Careers College (ACC).
In late 2011 he returned to BIITE in Alice Springs to be an Academic Support Advisor. In this role he managed a range of processes and was active in developing and delivering a range of support workshops and materials to support VET students and university students studying in the Australian Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Education (ACIKE), a higher education partnership with Charles Darwin University (CDU).
In January of 2015 he started as Team Leader for the Tourism & Hospitality Central team of CDU, based in Alice Springs. This team delivered tourism, guiding, hospitality, commercial cookery, and butchery qualifications. He was responsible for 15 dedicated VET courses, as well as operating the “Desert Lantern”, a fine dining training restaurant open to the public. He was a senior manager for the university and a Senior Lecturer in his speciality field of Tourism.
Across his academic career he has been fortunate to experience many different educational settings and has also been involved in several research projects and publications. He is excited to be joining Flinders University and hopes to use his skills, knowledge, and experience to assist staff and students to get the most out of their time and really enjoy the opportunities on offer.