JBS Paddock-to-Plate Cadetship – Paid Summer Undergraduate Placements

Spend your summer building the red meat workforce of the future.

JBS Australia, with the support of Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), is launching the Paddock-to-Plate Cadetship — 12-week paid placements running December 2026 to February 2027 across our operations in SA, VIC, NSW and TAS. Cadets receive approximately $13,000 including superannuation for the placement.

This isn't work experience spent watching from the sidelines. Each cadet owns a real project with real deliverables — think AI vision systems on production lines, Industry 4.0 digital twins, sustainability and Net Zero initiatives, performance analytics, lean manufacturing, people analytics, and media & communications — mentored by JBS leaders and presented back to site leadership at week 12.

And it leads somewhere. Cadets from earlier intakes are now in graduate roles with JBS, and several will be mentoring this summer's projects. Our Innovation & Industrial Engineering team is full of graduates who started exactly this way.

Who we're looking for

Undergraduates across engineering (mechanical, mechatronics, electrical, chemical, industrial, environmental, software), agricultural science, data science and analytics, computer science, business and HR, and media, communications and design.

The program is designed for penultimate-year undergraduates — students in other years of an undergraduate degree are welcome to apply, with preference given to penultimate-year students where applications are otherwise comparable. Applicants must be Australian citizens or permanent residents.

Where you could be based

Bordertown SA; Brooklyn, Port Melbourne and Cobram VIC; Scone NSW; Yambinya Station NSW (on-farm and feedlot); Tasmania; plus multi-site roles across our southern operations.

More drawn to the paddock than the plate?

The program name is no accident — roles at Yambinya Station NSW take the cadetship on-farm and into the feedlot (Digital Agriculture and Feedlot Performance), and a Tasmanian role covers Preventative Maintenance Digitisation. These roles are still under development — nominate them to register your interest and we'll send details as they're confirmed.

How to apply

Refer to this LinkedIn post (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7489098851669172224/) and then email ***************@jbssa.com.au and nominate the Role ID (or IDs) you'd like to apply for from our roles table — we'll send you the project brief, the application requirements and next steps.

Key dates

Applications close 11:59pm AEST, Sunday 20 September 2026. Interviews early October 2026, via Microsoft Teams. Placements run December 2026 – February 2027.

A huge thank you to Meat & Livestock Australia for supporting this program and helping us build the next generation of talent for the Australian red meat industry.