In collaboration with AEShareNet, I am co-hosting a seminar in Sydney on Monday 6 March, Creative Practices for a Connected World, with guest presenter Euan Semple.

Euan is a UK digital innovation expert and ex-Director of Knowledge Management Solutions at the BBC.

For more information see: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/Semple_seminar.asp

If you want to improve your work practices, your organisation and your service delivery in a connected world, this is the event to attend in 2006. The seminar will cover key issues for managers, teachers and support staff in education and training including:

• Using collaborative tools for innovation, networking and knowledge management
• Developing advanced capabilities in social computing, using blogs and wikis, RSS and folksomonies (no previous experience required!)
• Performing new roles and forming new relationships with learners and partners in a digital environment.
  

Australia’s economy depends on fostering the creativity and innovation of its workforce, and education and training is a key to achieving this high-skilled workforce. The Euan Semple Seminar will provide you with concepts, practices, strategies and tools to help transform education and training.

Early bookings are strong and the forum will definitely go ahead, so be quick to book to ensure a seat.

I have not posted new items to the blog for the last three months, while I prepared a new book: Ideas for practitioners: a professional development guide to growth and change in the VET sector.

The book is available from http://www.ibsa.org.au/pubdetails.jsp?publication=6137

Based on over sixty of my articles in Campus Review, with the addition of hundreds of questions and numerous suggestions for further reading, the book identifies key issues for the future for VET educators and promotes reflection on current practice.

The book holds potential value for all stakeholders in the sector – from industry trainers and assessors to institution-based teachers and educational managers, workplace supervisors, industry personnel, public servants and policy makers. Everyone in the sector needs to develop new ideas, says the author.

The eleven chapters highlight core issues in the sector: innovation, policy, industry needs, industry partnerships, RTO structures, leadership and strategy-making, change management, workforce development, new work roles, e-learning and e-business, and teaching, learning and assessment.

The book is nearly 70,000 words and there are 66 articles, 231 questions and over 150 references for further reading: enough material for twelve months of professional development activities.

Given the increasing pressures and new challenges facing VET providers, innovative ways are needed to improve organisational performance. One way is described below, by a leader of an award-winning RTO, Neil Black, Director of TAFE NSW North Coast Institute, in an interview I conducted recently:

What strategies have helped the Institute become high-performing?

We have had a very deliberate strategy that goes back a number of years, to position ourselves to be the high performing organisation we are today. One of the things we did in 2000 was to develop a strategic plan, using a scenario planning process that identified what were the key environmental factors impacting on the institute. Of course those factors included the national training system and the changing expectations of industry and business, the impact of changing technology and the ageing workforce. From that we devised our strategic goals and our priorities.

Then we asked: Are we equipped to achieve those goals? So we undertook a process – the capability platform – which is based on the concept that there are key elements to an organisation’s capability platform, that is the culture, the structure and systems, the experience and competencies of the workforce, but most of all the organisation’s people. When we looked at the capability platform we identified that we had tremendously strong people: people who were highly committed, creative, experienced, technically strong and well qualified. But the other areas of the capability platform were potentially inhibiting us from being a high-performing organisation.

How did you address these gaps?

We put in place an organisational improvement strategy that was based around changing our structure and putting the right people in the right positions, particularly middle-management, because no organisation can be high-performing if it doesn’t have the right people in the right positions. Then we determined what sort of culture we wanted and worked on developing that culture, but that is an ongoing process, which has to be supported by resources. We reviewed our systems as well, and through working with the staff we looked at whether there were inhibitors to them doing their jobs more effectively and efficiently: whether there were bureaucratic barriers or too much paperwork. We put a lot of effort into building our online capability. We doubled our staff development funding and put in place a $250,000 research and development fund, to support the sorts of changes we needed to make.

What are the critical success factors for organisational improvement?

There must be a context for organisational development and improvement and that context is your strategic plan. But the strategic plan must be developed and owned by your staff and your stakeholders, otherwise that context is not very effective. Organisational improvement needs to be strategic, in that you need to determine what you want to change and improve and then the various initiatives need to support where everyone knows you are going. I’ve seen examples of where people put in place ad hoc strategies, like projects for morale boosting, without any framework for it. Another thing I have learnt is the value of involving the key unions upfront and throughout the change process. I’ve found that if the unions are part of the process and know where you want to go, they will provide excellent support. You must also be prepared to resource the change process, so that staff  know you are serious about change.

Is there one key to high-performance?

The key to a high-performing organisation is its people and its culture. There is absolutely no question of that, in my opinion. Getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats on the bus has to be the first organisational improvement strategy because you can waste a lot of time and effort if you have a lot of blockages in your organisation. At middle level management level, blockages can be totally destructive. So you’ve got to have all the people, particularly your leadership and development people, all committed and enthusiastic about this sort of culture you’re trying to cultivate and the direction you’re trying to head in. Then it’s a lot easier to support organisational improvement because everyone’s rowing in the same direction.

The full interview is provided in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, October 2005.

What holds together the VET sector? On the surface, the VET sector is structured around government departments, industry groups, public and private providers, unions and professional associations, training packages and quality guidelines.

However, leaders in the sector have recognised for some years that the sector is also underpinned by the goodwill that exists between the many VET stakeholders. This recognition of the importance of goodwill is demonstrated by the national funding made available for an innovative program for VET communities of practice. Such communities are defined by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (Cultivating Communities of Practice, 2002) as groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

Since 2001, the VET sector has seed-funded over one hundred communities of practice through the national staff development and change management program, Reframing the Future, now overseen by DEST. Research shows that these communities of practice are effective mechanisms for VET practitioners to improve their collaboration and networking with peers, industry and the community.

Potential benefits of communities of practice include the following:

• Build trust and relationships
• Provide access to new knowledge
• Foster innovation
• Enhance professional practice
• Support the management of change
• Improve organisational productivity
• Increase social capital.

I provide an example of a community of practice that realises many of these benefits in my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 19 October 2005.

There is a multitude of challenges for VET practitioners implementing an industry-led, high-quality, national training system. Two fundamental challenges are changing providers’ structures and cultures so they are client-driven not supply-driven, and assisting enterprises to identify the way accredited training can be customised to assist with the achievement of business outcomes.

One way to meet such challenges is for VET practitioners to develop expertise as change agents. The term change agent is taken to mean anyone involved in initiating or implementing change.

However, research shows that the change agent role in VET is not to be under-estimated, as change agents need the ability to adopt a range of roles which could include being opportunists, diplomats and networkers. To effectively assist the change process, change agents also need an advanced range of skills and knowledge, as well as courage and sensitivity.

Over the last three years, thirty one VET practitioners have undertaken a sub-program on change agency within Reframing the Future, the national staff development and change management program now funded through DEST. The sub-program is called National Training Change Agents and annually involves around ten practitioners, drawn from across Australia. I am the sub-program’s mentor.

The sub-program supports internal change agents who are staff members of VET organisations, who operate as change facilitators within their own organisations. The sub-program also caters for VET practitioners operating as external change agents, working outside of their own organisations, for instance brokering training arrangements between industry groups and providers.

Challenges for VET change agents include:

• The volume of changes occurring in VET
• The ambitious, multiple goals of providers
• The differing nature of each separate industry
• The complex interdependencies of providers and industry
• The differing perceptions of VET stakeholders about what needs to change
• The varieties of resistance to change within VET
• The raised expectations of VET change agent.

I explore these ideas further in my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 12 October 2005.

For a strong and vibrant VET sector, leaders are needed who have a clear vision and innovative strategies. One such national VET leader is Malcolm Goff, Managing Director of Challenger TAFE in Western Australia, whom I interviewed recently for my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 5 October 2005.  Following is an excerpt from the interview.

Does Challenger aspire to high-performance?

High-performance is embedded in our culture. We committed ourselves to it some six years ago because we recognised that even with public funding there are no guarantees these days. Our public funded activities depended on our performance in the marketplace and of course increasingly our income is depended on our commercial work. Increasingly public money is being put out through competitive processes.

Is Challenger future-oriented?

Our vision is to be a high-performing, visionary organisation and that is reflected in our strategic and business planning processes. We are always thinking about futures. Yes we learn from experience and so forth but we are focused on positioning, repositioning and positioning ourselves. We live in a changing world and we need to be a changing and a dynamic organisation.

What are the leadership principles within Challenger?

Leadership can’t be formula-driven, but it goes something like this. It’s about understanding the policy directions of government. It’s about understanding the needs of your clients, be they individuals or industry, and positioning your organisation to deliver against those. And most importantly communicating and discussing those directions within your organisation, and in so doing empowering staff to deliver against the needs of clients. It is not about directing. Yes of course, there are certain checks and balances that every agency has to have in place, but within those parameters it is about an individual staff member seeing an opportunity that is part of core business and knowing they can go for that opportunity and it is the right thing to do.

Is leadership at Challenger a team effort?

No one person can have all the knowledge or all the skills and therefore your executive team is a very important part of the ultimate performance of the organisation. We as a team spend a considerable amount of time in any one year in discussing and debating environmental issues then coming to a consensus about what are the key strategies and business actions we need to take to take into account in this environmental analysis. It is not just a one-off: it is a continual and ongoing activity.

What is your greatest satisfaction as Challenger’s managing director?

Leading an organisation to where we have today, where people are initiating, and creating and achieving without any direct involvement of myself.

What will a large TAFE college look like in the future?

If you can conceptualise a large TAFE college of the future as one that is built around having big campuses, then that’s a mistake. The future is about de-institutionalising. It’s about looking for industry partnerships, and they will manifest themselves in different ways: it must not be a one-size fits all. A very one-dimensional view of an RTO-industry partnership is that the RTO offers training to the industry. An RTO-industry partnership is about joint ownership, it’s about sharing, it’s about jointly contributing.

A key to the growth of Australia’s economy is the health of the service industries, such as the retail, tourism and recreation industries. These service industries are underpinned by workforce skills, but clarifying which skills are common across all of these industries and which skills are specifically related to any one industry is a challenge being addressed by the DEST-funded Service Industries Skill Council.

“Some of the customer service skills needed by staff in a retail enterprise are the same as those needed at the reception desk in a doctor’s surgery, but the context is different and therefore the application of those skills is different,’ says Jeanette Allen, Chief Executive Officer of Service Skills. “It is partly about how skills are applied. The contextualisation of skills is vitally important to that enterprise,” says Allen.

Service Skills is responsible for influencing skills development opportunities for approximately 3 million of Australia’s 10 million workers, covering over 637,000 businesses. Industries involved include the wholesale, retail and personal services industries, the tourism and hospitality industry and the sport and recreation industry.

The labour-intensive nature of these industries means that the quality of skills is a key determinant of productivity. “In a people-intensive industry, meeting consumer and customer service demand is the paramount driver of skill needs,” says Allen.
Skill needs range from the technical skills for new entrants to the ongoing currency of skills required by the existing workforce. Skill development in service industries is made all the more difficult because the industries are often characterised by a young workforce mostly engaged in part-time or casual positions. These industries sometimes operate in non-traditional hours and in many cases are highly seasonal. 

According to Service Skills, challenges for service industries include:

• Providing resource products and services that support workers to rapidly acquire or upgrade broad-based skills and to continually refresh product-specific skills
• Ensuring that workers are multi-skilled and have the skills to deal with a wide range of cultural demands by customers
• Meeting the demand by enterprises for workers to acquire or update discrete skills that provide ‘just enough’ skill to meet enterprises’ immediate requirements
• Facilitating industry career paths and qualifications to help attract and retain workers to the industries
  Meeting the demand for employability skills such as problem solving, adaptability and communication.

I discuss these issues further in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 30 September 2005.

Some responses to addressing skill shortages are simple and short-term, such as increasing the number of skilled migrants. In contrast, the NSW Department of Education (DET) has taken up the complex challenge of creating healthy ‘skill ecosystems’, capable of sustaining skill formation and use. Following is a brief discussion on the concept, from my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 21 September 2005.

Originally the concept of skill ecosystems was used to explain the growth of the IT industry’s high-skill cluster in Silicon Valley, California. Following developments in Silicon Valley, skill ecosystems came to be seen as clusters of inter-related skills and knowledge within regions or industries. These ecosystems are driven by factors like technology, competition, culture, structure, regulation and the organisation of work.  

“Now we are extending the idea of skill ecosystems to understand and support more robust learning and employment clusters across all skill levels,” says Leslie Loble, Deputy Director General, Strategic Planning and Regulation, NSW DET. Over the last two years, Loble and her team have tested the theory through projects across Australia, with support from the Department of Education, Science and Technology (DEST) and the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training.

According to Leslie Loble, a skill ecosystem perspective has the following characteristics:

• focuses on industry economics and the workplace context of skill development and use
• sees a set of common interests uniting organisations in the cluster or supply chain
• views the training provider as central but part of a diverse group of workers, employers, researchers, technology suppliers, industry regulators, contractors, consumers or purchasers
• believes that skill formation strategies must go beyond traditional training responses.

Each of the funded projects is taking a different approach to creating skill ecosystems, explains Loble: “Some are exploring ways to connect part-time and casual jobs across a whole industry so the jobs become full-time equivalent in hours, earnings and security. Others are linking training providers early and directly to other innovators, to get faster diffusion of new technology to skilled workers who can use it.”

New policy settings and new VET practices are possible, says Loble: “If we get it right, we just might have a policy and a process that will produce the mix of skills and jobs, productivity and prosperity that mark sustainable skill ecosystems.”

How innovation can be fostered in large training providers is the focus of my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 14 Sept 2005.

For the column, I interviewed Box Hill Institute of TAFE CEO John Maddock, following his Institute being awarded, for the second year in a row, Victoria’s Large Training Provider of the Year.  Some excerpts from the interview follow.

How does innovation start in your institute?

Innovation springs from the way we manage the whole of the institute and the way people within the institute operate and behave. The innovations are supported at all levels, but the ideas come from our people and they get developed up and it’s really a team effort. We go out of our way within the institute to set up mechanisms for individuals and teams to get the opportunity to put forward new ideas and then we look for ways to provide support. We strive to create a climate where all staff are leaders.

How do you involve your clients in innovation?

The staff become extremely passionate not only about the innovation but about the client group they’re doing the innovation for, and that passion then starts to flow over to our client group who also start to become passionate. And then what happens is that the relationship between the individual staff members in the institute and our client base or the enterprise or the community or the student becomes more powerful: it creates an energy that is very hard to describe, and that is what we are trying to achieve all of the time.

Do you have a planned, systematic approach to innovation?

Our planned approach to innovation is deliberate. We believe that if we can set the plans in place at the front-end and make sure we have a balance between the management of the operation and the strategic directions we want to take, then what you’ve got is a platform for reacting when you need to react, for being opportunistic when you need to be opportunistic. But if you don’t have a good plan in place at the front end, what happens is that people continue to do the same things all of the time and they’re not constantly challenging what they’re doing.

How do you sustain innovations?

We work very hard to sustain innovations, and so do our partners. We look at what we need to do to reinvest. We don’t just look at a new approach and say it will be alright, for all time: the whole philosophy of continuous improvement is something we really believe in and we work hard at trying to do it. I talk to my staff all the time about the one-percenters, how important the one-percenters are and how each and every one of us has control over those one-percenters. It is that sort of philosophy and the hard work that staff do in identifying and then making it happen, in doing those one-percenters, that keeps the improvements going and sustains the innovation. 

From this interview and from my other research, I have found that innovation has the following benefits:

• Re-invigorates the organisation
• Refreshes its products and services
• Improves its customer responsiveness
• Delivers its customers superior value
• Demonstrates its staff capabilities
• Increases its uniqueness
• Underpins its sustainable competitive advantage.

I recently interviewed RMIT Vice Chancellor Margaret Gardner about her ideas for VET, for my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review. The interview focused on a number of ideas she raised in her recent Inaugural Speech. Following is an excerpt from the column.

What is distinctive about RMIT’s approach to vocational education?

RMIT has been involved in vocational education since 1887. That gives it a long history of engagement in the field and I think that has helped shape RMIT’s overall educational and pedagogic approach. And that is very important. One of the key features of RMIT is that across higher education and vocational education it is a university that is focused on professional and vocational education. It is focused on providing an educational experience that is engaged with industry, highly focused on application and very strongly work-integrated.

What are the origins of RMIT’s work-integrated approach?

Sometimes people have characterised our vocational and vocational education focus to be narrow.  Yet if you look at RMIT’s history and you look at its motto, which means “Skilled Hand, Cultivated Mind,” its beginnings were in this strong work-integration and professional vocational ethos. It began teaching one of the early beginnings of architecture as well as a range of what many people would think of as traditional vocational areas, but it also taught in a whole range of creative areas and in language and in music. In other words, RMIT has an understanding that a professional and vocational emphasis is not a narrow emphasis: it is about building a rounded and full educational experience and one that is very strongly work-integrated.

What are the features of your work-integrated approach?

An interesting thing about RMIT is the work-integrated focus in many of its courses. RMIT has a design-engineering paradigm which is a very heavily problem-solving emphasis. This is fundamentally a very creative approach to the world because what you are building when you say work-integrated is people’s ability to understand the problems as they appear in industry and the community and to problem solve. To do that, you actually have to have a fundamental generic skill – a set of tools to enable you to engage in effective problem solving.

What is the design-engineering paradigm?

RMIT’s design-engineering paradigm is different from the ‘why is it so?’ question: it’s a ‘how will we make it work?’ approach and I think that is what is characteristic of us. It is fundamentally a creative impulse, creative in the sense of how will we make this work, how will we approach this issue? You draw out of the practical, out of the industry, out of the applied. That has a long history in RMIT, but it is a rich history. It’s the underlying impetus about how we think about education. It’s about what are the issues and the problems in the world as we see them and how do we make things work.

Do RMIT staff support work-integrated learning?

One of the real joys about being here is that RMIT has had this rich history of work-integrated learning. When you talk to people here, whether they’re new or they’ve been here a long time, in the way that any institution that has a sense of itself will know, you can see that what has been built into the curriculum over time, built in to all sorts of assumptions, the ether, the culture, is an understanding that this is what we are about in education. I found when I came here that people were deeply committed to that work-integrated learning and deeply committed to that creative impulse. Both of those things are deep in the culture here and I think it is because they go back to where it started. Our motto is not a bad capture of that.

The full interview is set out in Campus Review, 7 Sept 2005.

There is a tension in VET between compliance and creativity, in meeting the requirements of the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF). Resolving the tension needs changes at all levels of VET, according to the final report of the High Level Review of Training Packages: at the level of government systems, at the level of training providers and at the level of the VET practitioner.

How the individual VET professional can resolve this tension was the focus of a recent series of forums on professional judgment, organised by Reframing the Future. The forums were conducted in Townsville, Newcastle, Perth and Melbourne and were attended by over 170 VET practitioners representing public and private providers from many industry areas.

A primary aim of the forums was to enable VET practitioners “to develop more confidence in making professional judgments,” says Reframing’s National Project Director Suzy McKenna.

The opening speaker at the forums, Dr Anne Jones from Box Hill Institute of TAFE, reported on her interviews with VET educators about their assessment judgements. “What I found was that assessment judgements are not always simple,” says Jones. “Individual educators and teams make judgements within a personal and an historical context and a range of problems need to be solved during the assessment process.”

Her research uncovered the difficulties that professionals traverse: “I asked participants to tell me about times when it had been difficult to make an assessment decision about a learner’s level of competence and the stories poured out,” says Jones. “The difficulties included ethical, political and personal predicaments, lack of resources and social issues.”

Jones concludes that, in successfully making professional judgments, VET practitioners are characterised by “a seriousness of purpose, an ability to deal with predicaments and an appropriate use of pragmatism.”

Jones finds that characteristics of VET professionals are as follows:

• Start with a base of vocational and educational  knowledge
• Learn more on the job, especially through specific cases
• Incorporate publicly available knowledge with their personal practice
• Use tacit knowledge to read a situation
• Reflect on practice as a basis for making hard calls
• Make sound judgments based on experiences of similar cases
• Do the best they can.

Jones was one of four speakers at the national forums, each of whom tabled ‘think pieces’ on different aspects of professional judgement. The other presenters were auditors Andrea Bateman and Dr Russell Docking and myself.

My presentation at the forums addressed the issue of professional judgement in training delivery. I put the case that VET practitioners need to make numerous judgments about teaching and learning, including how to customise and personalise training, how to analyse an individual’s learning style, how to support different learner groups, how to provide learning in a variety of workplaces and how to address the needs of both the employer and the employee.

I extend this story in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 31 August 2005.

Given the increasing trend towards a competitive training market, the VET sector needs more examples of how providers can make profits while delivering quality services. A commanding example is provided by a very unlikely candidate, the Victorian not-for-profit company training provider MEGT Ltd.

CEO David Windridge explains MEGT’s apparent split personality: “We are not-for-profit, but we are operating commercially. A term I use to describe what we are is ‘commercial not-for-profit’.”

MEGT (Australia) Ltd is a ‘not for profit’ company limited by guarantee. Established in 1982 and governed by a Board of Directors, MEGT currently has an annual turnover of over $40 million. This turnover may be boosted by MEGT’s membership of a consortium that was recently awarded an Australian technical college in east Melbourne.

Since its launch in 1982 as a Group Training Company, MEGT has grown to become an organisation offering a wide range of services. For instance, as a group trainer MEGT now employs 1,000 apprentices, while its Sydney operation provides training to 400 self-funded students. These services are delivered by 250 staff operating from 23 offices throughout Victoria, with another two offices in Sydney and Newcastle. Several weeks ago MEGT acquired Island Group Training in Tasmania, adding offices in Hobart, Launceston and Devonport.

When Windridge was appointed CEO, he believed MEGT had no option but to operate commercially. “When I joined thirteen years ago we were very focused on being not-for-profit. But there was no-one out there to help us and the only way to succeed was to do it ourselves. So we rolled up our sleeves.”

Growth strategies that RTOs like MEGT use include:

• Monitor trends and respond to new opportunities
• Build strong relationships with industry, clients, suppliers and peers
• Expect staff to add value and to improve business outcomes
• Enhance your brand, presence and visibility in the market
• Expand and refresh your existing products and services
• Remain open to unexpected or initially complex opportunities
• Balance expansion of current services with launching start-up ventures
• Merge with or acquire compatible businesses
• Form alliances and partnerships with complementary organisations.

One key to MEGT’s commercial success is the expectation of its staff. “We have a top quality staff, but organisations like ours need to have the capacity to move staff on, where they are not adding value to the organisation,” says Windridge. “Staff should enjoy working with you, and be happy at work. But they have to give something back: work shouldn’t just give them a pleasant experience.”

I develop this story further in my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 24 August 2005.

One of the perennial quests for TAFE institutes in Australia is to find an organisational design that suits a demand-driven sector. A compelling new institute structure has just emerged which demands examination across the sector, because it challenges some long-cherished organisational designs in TAFE.

The new organisational model is all the more compelling because it is being implemented by the Large Training Provider of the Year in both 2000 and 2002, the Institute of TAFE Tasmania. This best-of-breed organisation also commands attention because, as CEO John Smyth points out, “In the NCVER report released last month, Tasmania was the only state where VET enrolments didn’t go down last year.”

While most TAFE institutes have many goals, TAFE Tasmania has just two, and the new structure is built around them. The two goals are, firstly, the provision of training that is driven by Tasmanian enterprises, and secondly, the provision of career courses aligned to Tasmania’s economic and skills development needs. John Smyth explains: “Rather than the traditional structure of a learning manager, a corporate manager, a business manager, we have two general managers, focused on each of the institute goals.” 

Features of the restructure include:

• customers, clients and the board are at the top of the organisational chart
• staff teams are in the middle of the organisational chart
• the CEO and support units are at the bottom of the chart
• some traditional layers of management are removed
• the 500 full-time teaching staff are organised into 80 enterprise-focused teams
• industry training is underpinned by research into each enterprise
• teams are empowered to negotiate directly with enterprises
• the 80 staff teams are supported by an Enterprise Development Team.

To achieve the institute’s goal of meeting the needs of enterprises, the institute abandoned the traditional faculties, department or school structures and organised the staff into numerous small teams, all with an enterprise focus. Each of the teams is a response to an identified industry need. This use of enterprise-based teams is “a thorough approach to repositioning the organisation to think about clients first,” says General Manager, Enterprise Development, Jules Carroll.

Carroll finds that identifying enterprise needs is challenging: “It takes some guts to look at the demographics, at the environment you’re servicing, and to really ask the hard questions about what’s important here, what’s going to make a difference, what’s going to support growth in this environment and how can we contribute to that.”

From this research it is apparent that attitudes within TAFE Tasmania are as follows:

• An agile enterprise provides learning opportunities that satisfy customer needs
• Foster a strong industry focus
• Make every customer contact matter
• Deliver a great learning experience
• Build a resilient business.

Compare these with the historical TAFE attitudes:

• A quality institution helps students to meet the teacher’s expectations
• Foster the institution’s reputation
• Ensure students appreciate our service
• Deliver a great teaching performance
• Build on our proud heritage.

I extended this story in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review, 17 August 2005.

One of the challenges to registered training organisations is to provide consistent, high quality services to enterprises that have branches across Australia. This challenge is particularly difficult for staff in long-established technical and further education (TAFE) Institutes who are only used to delivering in TAFE classrooms or campus workshops, at times and in ways that suit the trainer, rather than the enterprise client. 

This challenge confronted staff at the Geelong headquarters of the Gordon Institute of TAFE in 2000, when the Institute’s managers signed an agreement to deliver traineeships nationally to 650 Spotless Services staff. All the training was to be delivered in the many and varied workplaces of Spotless staff, not in Geelong.

Spotless is Australia’s largest provider of hospitality and domestic services, employing 35,000 people around the nation. Spotless also has a Defence Force contract to deliver all non-military services at sixteen military bases spread throughout Victoria, including services such as catering, warehousing, cleaning, laundry and housekeeping.

“The Spotless training contract marked a fundamental change in our business focus and in the way we deliver training,” says the Gordon Institute Director Martha Kinsman. “The contract signified a shift from a supply driven to demand driven approach for this 118 year old training organisation.”

The Gordon now focuses on delivering national workplace training services in the waste management and retail industries. Workplace training is delivered nationally to waste management companies such as Visy, Collex, Theiss and Cleanaway and to retail companies such as Jaycar Electronics and Bowens.

Today the Gordon maintains offices in Sydney and Brisbane with management and training staff sited locally. On any given day – weekends included – the Gordon has up to 135 trainers operating in the workplace. And there is a significant resource and administrative support network in place to ensure operational efficiency.

Tips for delivering nationally include:

• Align the training organisation’s strategic plans to fit the needs of national enterprises
• Develop relationships with enterprises that understand the business benefits of training
• Specialise in servicing enterprises from a small number of national industries
• Be client-driven in organising the training around the enterprise’s requirements
• Recruit or retrain staff who are able to deliver training in ways the industry clients prefer
• Ensure the workplace training is always high-quality, supported by customised resources.

I expand on this strategy-making story in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 10 August 2005.

Increasing the ‘voice and choice’ of VET students is the focus of a pioneering activity being conducted this year at Macquarie Fields, in Sydney’s south west. This activity is the subject of my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 3 August 2005.

The Macquarie Fields TAFE College pilot is one of eight being undertaken around NSW TAFE as part of project called ‘Personalised Learning: Improving Student Outcomes’. The project is managed by the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) Centre for Learning Innovation on behalf of the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training.

The intention of the pilots is to propose, develop, test and evaluate specific practices that would result in significant and beneficial change across the VET system.

I am evaluating the pilots for NSW DET. The evaluation involves identifying those aspects of the pilot project that provide a replicable, generalisable and sustainable model for significantly improving VET outcomes through the application of personalised learning approaches.

The personalised learning project was prompted by research in the UK. Leslie Loble, Deputy Director-General DET, says that personalised learning is what student-focused teachers do when they recognise and address the needs of individual learners. “It builds on the principles of flexible delivery and quality teaching to support individual students as they travel along their learning journeys.”

Elements of personalised learning include:

• a culture that embraces high expectations of students
• structures and technology that promote greater focus on the learner
• teaching strategies that reflect clear standards yet can be differentiated for individuals
• students taking responsibility for their own learning
• involvement of and collaboration between parties such as industry and the community
• workforce development that promotes personalised attention to students.

Currently I have completed a 22,000 word interim report on the project and will prepare a final report by mid-October 2005.

Given the current national debate about industrial relations, it is timely to explore the nature of the work required of the VET practitioner. The brief exploration below – based on my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review on 20 July 2005 - indicates that the work required of the VET practitioner is becoming more diverse, more subtle and more complex, as the world of work changes.

A swathe of research reports in the last few years consistently shows that changes in the world of work are forcing changes in the way training is delivered in Australia. Changes in the world of work include the need for skill development that is timely, occurs in the workplace where possible and assists organisations to achieve a competitive advantage. Hence, VET practitioners need to develop new ways of working, in response to such changes in the world of work

In the NCVER publication ‘The vocational education and training workforce. New roles and ways of working. At a glance’ (2004), Guthrie notes that reforms in VET over the past ten years have had a significant effect on the work of its staff. VET staff now operate in more competitive markets and face increased demands from their various clients for higher quality and more relevant programs. Understanding and keeping up with these changes and working in new and more flexible ways are major challenges for the VET workforce.

To meet the demand for customised workplace training, Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine in ‘Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET’ (2003) found that one result of the industry-led national training system is that detailed and customised workplace training demands on VET are potentially as varied as there are enterprises in Australia. This is bringing about new and intensified professional, technical and educational roles for VET practitioners especially at the frontline, and particularly for teachers, workplace trainers and assessors, workplace mentors and supervisors.
 
In response to the increased number of settings where VET practitioners need to provide training services, Chappell, Hawke, Rhodes and Solomon (2003), in the Phase 1 report for the High-level Review of Training Packages project, suggest that VET is increasingly reliant on highly skilled VET professionals with a raft of new skills. They find that VET must rely more than ever on learning specialists who have an appreciation of the full pedagogical choices that are open to them and which are consistent with the context, clients and learning sites in which they work.

According to Chappell et al. ( 2003), new skills of VET practitioners include:

• have and choose from a sophisticated pedagogical repertoire
• use more learner-centred, work-centred and attribute-focused approaches
• eschew traditional transmission pedagogies
• can work with multiple clients, in multiple contexts and across multiple learning sites
• assist in the integration of learning and work in the contemporary work environment.

Dickie, Eccles, FitzGerald and McDonald in ‘Enhancing the Capability of VET Professionals Project: Final Report’ (2004) describe the environment in which VET professionals will work in the future. It will be an environment characterised by increasing diversity in the client base; increasing sophistication in client expectations; change in products and expansion of options for training delivery; changes in employment, work roles, team structures and places of work; increasing competition and increasing demand; and globalisation of the training market.

Simply put, to meet the demand for customised industry training, VET practitioners need to perform new and multiple roles and to develop a repertoire of pedagogical approaches. Numerous descriptions of VET practitioners performing different roles and developing fresh approaches to their profession are provided in a report recently released by Reframing the Future that I co-authored with McKenna, Perry and Bald, called ‘New ways of working in VET’ (2005). This article is based on the new report.

‘New ways of working in VET’ is available from http://reframingthefuture.net

Can VET providers do it all? I am constantly asking VET senior managers whether their organisations can continue to do everything: that is, to find the raw materials, to manufacture products, and then to market, sell, deliver and support those products. In VET terms, these activities roughly equate to preparing learning materials, and marketing, delivering and supporting training programs.

In other industries, it is becoming increasingly common for organisations to outsource some of their functions, particularly by forming relationships with multiple suppliers. For instance, retailers like Myers source their clothes from a raft of clothing manufacturers and the major banks in Australia commonly use mortgage brokers to find new borrowers. But in VET, many providers are used to doing everything and are finding it hard to relinquish some traditional functions.

I find that many VET providers are reluctant to outsource the preparation of learning materials and the delivery of training. Preparing learning materials is, for some, sacrosanct: it is the purest activity an educator can undertake. For others, it is impossible to contemplate delegating to outsiders the delivery of training.

These long-held attitudes are coming under intense pressure in contemporary VET from two unrelenting new forces. First, the emergence of a demand-driven VET sector means that providers are being asked to cater for the training needs of each and every enterprise, and Australia consists of literally millions of enterprises. Second, the emergence in Australian society of a consumer attitude that services need to be shaped ‘just for me’ and made available when I want them is now being applied to VET.

The truth is that VET providers can’t meet these rising demands on their own, so they need to develop innovative strategies to continue to satisfy their customers while constantly refreshing their product line and maintaining quality. One strategy is to stop providing some services: that is, to reduce the product line. And another strategy is to outsource some existing functions.

Some guidelines for outsourcing are:

• Determine those functions that can be outsourced
• Assess the costs, benefits and risks of outsourcing those functions
• Identify suppliers who are reliable and expert in providing the functions
• Develop quality control mechanisms to monitor the suppliers
• Require the suppliers to regularly refresh their services and products
• Actively manage the supplier relationships in a collaborative manner.

I extend these ideas and provide an example of a niche supplier to whom registered training providers outsource in my regular ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 27 July 2005.

I have just prepared with three colleagues a publication called “Critical Issues. A draft literature review on critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment in vocational education and training, version 26 June 2005”. My fellow researchers are Clive Chappell, Andrea Bateman and Susan Roy.

The draft literature review was developed by the above researchers as part of the Consortium Research Program: ‘Supporting vocational education and training providers in building capability for the future’. This program is funded by the Australian, state and territory governments through the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) and managed by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). The draft will be finalised in November 2005.

The purpose of this literature review is to highlight recent thinking and research at the national and international level that can inform the development of teaching, learning and assessment practices in the VET sector. The review may encourage VET practitioners to develop enhanced services to meet the increasingly varied demands of individuals, employers and industry. The review may also encourage VET organisations and systems to identify resources required to support the provision of these new services.

The review begins by indicating what the literature is saying about the environmental factors that are driving the changes and creating challenges in VET teaching, learning and assessment.
Although there is broad agreement in the literature concerning the drivers of change in vocational education, there are diverse suggestions regarding appropriate responses. In order to make sense of the diversity of suggested responses provided in the literature, this review poses a number of questions. The questions are:

1. What do individual learners and industry clients want from VET in terms of teaching and learning experiences, and services and support, and how can these best be met?
2. What skills are needed by VET practitioners in the design of learning programs and resources and in the provision of assessment services to meet the needs of different client groups, and how might these be developed most effectively?
3. What are the critical success factors – individual, organisational and systemic – for VET providers in developing and implementing innovative approaches to teaching, learning and assessment, and how might models about good practice be most effectively transmitted?

The full review is available at http://consortiumresearchprogram.net.au/html/

Please send any comments to Principal Researcher. Dr John Mitchell johnm@jma.com.au and/or join the online forum at http://consortiumresearchprogram.net.au/forums/index.php#2

Indigenous communities in Australia often face chronic unemployment, lack of housing, poor health and low school attendance. Resultant social issues include high unemployment, imprisonment due to offending behaviours, exclusion from the education system, youth homelessness, and a high incidence of suicide and poor mental health and well being. These social issues are exacerbated in regional areas by fluctuations in the economy and geographical isolation (see http://www.refs.com.au/pathways.htm).

Clearly, Indigenous communities need access to alternative post-school education and training employment and business options. One response is the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), which aims to improve overall Indigenous employment levels.

To complement the Federal Government’s CDEP, the NSW Government cleverly created a major program for improving the health and living standards of Aboriginal communities in NSW. The Aboriginal Communities Development Program (ACDP) is investing $240 million over the ten years to raise the health and living standards of selected, priority Aboriginal communities. ACDP allocates funding to Aboriginal communities to provide new housing, repair, or to renovate or replace existing housing stock and upgrade or replace existing outdated water and sewerage systems or other essential infrastructure. CDEP with ACDP is a strong combination.

Benefits of the Aboriginal program ACDP include:

Many VET systems around Australia have been restructured in the last few years – mostly involving the reduction in the number of TAFE Institutes, to fit a formula of around 500-600,000 people per Institute. None have restructured as comprehensively as Queensland proposes in its recent green paper called Skills for Jobs and Growth.

For my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 27 June 2005, I interviewed Chris Robinson, Deputy Director-General of the Queensland Department of Employment and Training, who headed up the team which produced the green paper.

Key proposals made by Chris and his team in the green paper are:

• Associate professionals to be a priority group for VET provision
• Mature aged workers requiring reskilling to be given special assistance
• Recognition of existing competencies to be given increased attention
• TAFE to focus more on delivering Certificate Level 4 and above
• Private providers to be encouraged to increase provision for Certificate Level 2-3
• TAFE Queensland to introduce state-wide specialist centres
• Southbank TAFE to become an Institute of Technology
• The Trade and Technician Skills Institute to coordinate apprenticeship training
• Apprenticeship completions to be based on competencies not time served.

Other key points made by Chris Robinson in the interview included:

• Infrastructure is not just communications, transport, water, power: it’s also skills. So I think there’s a lot of economic reasoning behind it (the green paper).
• We found in preparing the paper that the biggest skill deficits in the labour market are in associate professional jobs. There are more people in that area of the market who don’t have qualifications than in any other higher skilled jobs area. That’s a major issue for Queensland and Australia.
• The Australian Training Colleges idea is not quite the right focus for a broad attack on trade skills shortages because ATCs focus on school-based trade training. Queensland’s proposed Institute is really a different kind of idea focused on the main part of the trade training system.
• It’s time we modernised our apprenticeship system and allowed people – once they completed all their competencies required for an apprenticeship – not to serve out their time just for the sake of it. There are too many shortages, too many urgent needs, to keep doing that.
• We and every other VET system in Australian have too much focus on some of the service industry Certificates at Level 2 and 3, compared to technician training especially and some of our other Certificate 4 and Diploma level.
• We need to move on from thinking about private providers as the competition and think more about them as a strategic partner.
• Industry has had as much trouble articulating the rapidly changing nature of employment and work skill needs as governments have.

This wide-ranging, innovative and insightful green paper is now the focus of public consultation.

Recently I interviewed the outgoing boss of TAFE NSW, Robin Shreeve, on the eve of his departure to London. The full interview appeared in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review on 22 June 2005.

His hopes for the future of TAFE were as follows:

• TAFE will remain the people’s provider, accessible and convenient
• TAFE will be the provider of skills for life
• TAFE will continue to be committed to quality and continuous improvement
• TAFE will stay customer-focused and improve its marketing
• TAFE will focus even more on teaching, learning and practitioners’ judgment.

His concerns were:

• The Federal VET Minister’s confrontationist style
• ACCI’s industrial relations agenda dominating VET
• TAFE Institutes wrongly seen as technical high schools or watered down universities
• A plethora of small providers dependent on Government funding
• TAFE becoming a ‘residualised’ system, providing where others won’t or can’t.

In a wide-ranging but insightful interview, some of his other comments included:

• The VET agenda seems to be dominated by discussion of industrial arrangements within the system. It seems to be one of the main reasons for the reform agenda, which is certainly an Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) view.
• I’m not denying we don’t need to have a look at workplace reform but we should be doing it in a consultative way rather than a confrontationist way. My successor will have to deal with an aggressive mono-policy view from the Federal Government which is pretty confrontational.
• I constantly find, especially in the VET sector, many people misunderstand what business we’re in and we’ve still got issues communicating to the world the business we’re in. Many people think we’re either technical high schools or watered down universities and we’re neither. The whole notion that TAFE is the post-compulsory provider for people who cannot get into university is not the conceptualisation I want.
• We want TAFE to be the Marks and Spencers, the provider who provides everything but is renowned for quality. TAFE is the mass provider, but we’re not a rite of passage organisation, we’re a provider of skills throughout life. Half the taxi drivers out the front are doing TAFE programs to get the next job. That’s critical and that’s where I get the excitement of taking the sector forward. TAFE is the provider of skills for life and the people’s provider in terms of being the mass provider.
• For the first time ever I can see a scenario where TAFE could end up as a ‘residualised’ system and I don’t think (Federal Minister) Gary Hardgrave or ACCI or anyone else wants that, but that could be an unforeseen consequence of an industrial relations driven agenda, and I think that’s the great danger.
• I think the British define quality in terms of educational quality which is rooted around making judgments about classroom or workshop practice. We (Australia) don’t do enough of that, but I don’t think that either in the UK or in Australia we’ve got the balance right: I don’t think we do enough observing of teaching practice and maybe they do too much.

Each year, over a quarter of a million secondary school students leave school before completing Year 12. Many do not re-engage with education and find themselves unemployed for the long-term. These early school leavers become disengaged for different reasons, including homelessness, substance abuse, financial hardship, low self-esteem, mental health problems or lack of basic language and literacy skills.

The scale of the problem is reflected in the following statistics:

• the number of teenagers not in full-time study or full-time work in Australia is higher than at any time in the last six years (Dusseldorp Skills Forum Key Indicators 2004)
• two-thirds of the 270,000 young people annually who leave school early will become unemployed, or employed only in casual jobs (BCA 2003)
• over 50,000 young people who leave school early each year will never gain further qualifications (BCA 2003)
• the cost to Australia of young people leaving school early is estimated at $2.6 billion each year (BCA 2003).

To identify the support required by disengaged youth to enter training or employment, the South Australian (SA) Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology (DFEEST) undertook extensive research last year. Guided by similar initiatives by TAFE in NSW and Victoria, the research also investigated what related partnerships are required with the community and business.

The research focused on an initiative called  SA Works ‘Learn to Earn’, which offered youth the opportunity to participate in up to 1,000 hours of full time training in a trade-based area experiencing a skill shortage. The program went beyond trade skills, says DFEEST’s Project Manager Annie Fergusson: “The program set out to give participants employability skills as well as life skills.”

In the 2004 intake of 107 young people in the ‘Learn to Earn’ program, 74% were early school leavers. All were drawn from disadvantaged groups: 7% were disabled; 7% were from a non-English speaking background; 15% were Indigenous; 22% were long-term unemployed; and 35% were from rural areas. The program was conducted by TAFE SA at Whyalla, Gawler, Elizabeth, Port Adelaide, O’Halloran Hill and Tea Tree Gully.

A feature of the program was ‘project-based learning’, enabling participants to learn as the same time as contributing to projects that benefited the local community. For example, the O’Halloran Hill project pursued an environmental theme and involved the restoration of a trailer for a local wildlife protection organisation.

Fergusson’s research indicates that multiple strategies are required to address the needs of disengaged youth, such as the facilitation of project-based learning, the creation of “youth friendly” learning environments, the use of individual case management techniques and the development of durable partnerships. As training involves more than just mechanical skill building – in drawing on both values and emotions – Fergusson finds that one of the challenges for TAFE SA staff delivering programs for disengaged youth is “compassion fatigue”.

Going beyond the economic benefits and underlining the essential humaneness of assisting disengaged youth, SA Premier Mike Rann believes that “the best thing” about the program is that it gives young people “new skills, self-confidence and the ability to work constructively with other people.”

I explore this story further in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review, Wed 15 June 2005.

In an increasingly competitive training market, progressive private providers are improving the marketing of their brand, even when the brand is already well known. A prime example is provided by the Billy Blue Schools Group in North Sydney. One of the challenges for the Group is to continually improve on a unique brand which incorporates “a quirky, irreverent brand name and a commitment to the highest quality education and training”, says Managing Director, Bruce McKenzie.

Billy Blue the man arrived in Sydney as a convict in 1801, on a seven-year sentence for stealing a small amount of sugar. Billy became a good friend of Governor Macquarie, launched a rowing boat service across the harbour and received a grant of 80 acres at what is now known as Blues Point, in North Sydney. Billy Blue was an entrepreneur.

Billy Blue the organisation started life as a monthly design magazine in 1977, before adding a design and writing consultancy, Billy Blue Creative. Ten years later the founders of Billy Blue Creative decided to open a tiny design school to train people who would eventually work in the studio. A crowd of four was expected but sixty six people enrolled. “In other words, the school was created by industry for industry,” says McKenzie. “It’s a culture and philosophy that all the schools within the Group have been building on ever since.”

The Billy Blue brand has industry respect, says McKenzie: “Industry permeates everything we do. It’s a key reason for our reputation and our success.” When students enrol with Billy Blue, the added value they gain includes the industry relevance of their training and the industry recognition of their education and training as high quality.

McKenzie is clear about the need for ongoing brand management: “The brand depends on the culture of creativity, quality and innovation permeating the organisation,” says McKenzie. “Billy Blue stands for originality and being at the forefront of new ideas, like its namesake.”

Compelling reasons to brand your registered training organisation (RTO) include:

• a brand offers added value to customers
• this added value differentiates the RTO from the other 4,000 RTOs
• the added value wins customer loyalty and repeat business
• a successfully branded RTO commands a premium price for its services
• an effectively branded RTO attracts invaluable word-of-mouth endorsement
• a brand-leading RTO wins most market share
• a brand-leading RTO sensibly leverages off a customer-focused staff
• a brand-leading RTO enhances staff satisfaction.

I develop further this story in my column 'Inside VET' in Campus Review, 8 June 2005.

One Australian industry that needs to withstand intense global competition is the food manufacturing industry. However, in attempting to provide world-class products, food manufacturers face challenges such as maintaining a high quality level and overcoming the shortage of skilled staff during peak seasonal periods.

New ways to address the demanding training needs of food manufacturers have been developed by the Innoven Food Industry Centre within the Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE in northern Victoria. Innoven’s Manager for Manufacturing, Sandy Powell, explains: “If training is not going to get performance benefits for a manufacturer, then they simply won’t do it. So Innoven’s not interested in delivering training unless we’ve identified how it’s going to help the manufacturer.”

Innoven’s focus on client performance is part of a broader Victorian Government plan to keep Victorian industries competitive internationally and to build the workforce’s knowledge and skills. Innoven is one of eighteen TAFE specialist centres established with seed funding from the Victorian Government that are helping to build Victorian TAFE’s capability to meet the skill needs of industry.

Innoven’s new approach to training has netted it partnerships with some of Australia’s biggest players in the food industry such as Nestle, Kraft, SPC Ardmona and Tatura Milk Industries.

Innoven’s Powell sees the new TAFE approach as a business-to-business relationship: “While business managers recognise TAFE as a provider to the community for training, we also want managers to see TAFE as a provider of services to industry beyond traditional training, by jointly working to deliver measurable performance outcomes,” says Powell.

“We find that industry will invest in training and pay fee-for-service if we get the relationship right and value add continuously,” says Powell. “Industry is happy to invest in training that has a measurable return on investment.”

The traditional model for industry training is provider-centric, characterised by the following actions:

• Advertise the attributes of the training organisation
• Promote the availability of accredited training
• Deliver ‘one size fits all’ training in the classroom
• Produce graduates who may or may not be able to improve their enterprise.

In contrast, Innoven’s model is enterprise-centric and learner-centric and includes these steps:

• Research the industry and each individual enterprise
• Establish and maintain relationships with enterprise managers
• Determine each enterprise’s needs and issues
• Identify individual learner’s needs within each enterprise
• Provide teaching and assessment in the workplace
• Assist individual workers to obtain relevant accredited qualifications
• Deliver a business improvement for the enterprise.

Not surprisingly, around 95% of Innoven’s training is on-the-job learning, not traditional full-time training at the TAFE Institute. One of Innoven’s trainers is “embedded” within Nestle, delivering training at Nestle’s premises in Sydney and in Melbourne.

I develop this case study further in my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, in the issue dated 1 June 2005.

On 14 April 2005 I delivered a paper on ‘Effective VET networking with industry in the marketplace’ at the eighth Australian VET Research Association (AVETRA) Conference in Brisbane. Following are some excerpts.

Abstract

Increasingly, the VET marketplace requires vocational education and training (VET) practitioners to network with industry representatives. ‘Networking with industry’ is a new catch-cry within VET, but more research is needed to understand the complexities and benefits of such networking. This paper is based on research conducted over two years, 2003-2004, of forty networks funded by Reframing the Future. The paper builds on a report entitled Building Industry Training Networks (Mitchell 2004), and shows that networks are complex and can be difficult to manage, as participants’ needs and ambitions can constantly change. To be sustained, networks also need to continuously provide value for all members. The paper provides the VET sector with guidelines of how to effectively build networks that impact positively on the individuals and organisations involved and that enhance VET’s achievements in the marketplace.

Summary points

A summary of the key findings is provided below and a fuller description is provided in Mitchell (2004).

• The trust, goodwill, innovation and collaboration in industry training networks can support the national training system
• The need for industry training networks is increasing, as VET organisations become more aware of their dependency on relationships
• Open or loosely structured networks suit the diverse and dispersed membership of many industry training networks
• Building industry training networks is made challenging by factors such as inexperience in networking and the limited resources of small business to participate
• A deep knowledge of VET and high-level facilitation skills help industry training networks function effectively
• Efficient information sharing processes help industry training networks function effectively
• Industry training networks generate new knowledge about practices and possibilities in the national training system
• Individuals, organisations and systems benefit from industry training networks
• The achievements of the 200-2004 industry training networks are impressive given the complexities faced.

Conclusions

This research indicates that it is possible to effectively build and manage industry training networks in VET. The stories of human, organisational and systemic collaboration set out in Mitchell (2004) provide hope for the positive future development of the VET sector. Further encouragement is provided by additional accounts of the 2004 networks set out in Mitchell, McKenna, Perry and Bald (2005; in draft).

To sustain the achievements of the 2003-2004 networks, continued effort is required by the members of each network. All the networks will need to keep revitalising themselves, as members’ goals and ambitions change and external conditions shift. Effective networks are like every other type of healthy relationship in that they need continual care and attention. Ford et al (2003) caution that networks can easily become burdens and liabilities, if not managed effectively.

References

Ford, D., Gadde, L-E, Hakansson, H. & Snehota, I. (2003), Managing Business Relationships, Second Edition, Wiley,  West Sussex
Mitchell, J.G. (2004), Building Industry Training Networks, ANTA, Melbourne
Mitchell, J.G., McKenna, S., Perry, W. & Bald, C. (2005), New Ways of Working in VET, ANTA, Melbourne (in draft)

For a copy of the paper email me at johnm@jma.com.au

The creation of a one-stop-shop, primarily for the distribution of training packages and related materials, is one of the changes to the VET system proposed by DEST’s Skilling Australia and supported by the subsequent consultations. I investigate issues related to this shop in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 18 May 2005.

A national VET expert in learning materials believes that a shop that sells products is too narrowly focused: the shop needs to embrace the online trading of learning materials by teachers and trainers across the sector. “Simply selling a training package or related materials is a no-brainer. VET has a golden opportunity to revolutionise teaching in Australia, by embedding the new practice of online trading of learning materials,” says Dennis Macnamara, Business Development Manager for AEShareNet.

AEShareNet is one of the success stories of VET in the age of e-education, quietly constructing an effective online database of over 20,000 learning materials that can be bought and re-used by teachers and trainers. Macnamara advocates that AEShareNet’s “new-age practice” of trading learning materials should be fully endorsed and utilised in the proposed new VET one-stop shop.

The value of trading learning materials is potentially huge in the multi-billion dollar VET sector, says Macnamara. “At the recent AVETRA conference in Brisbane, an ANTA paper suggested that VET is an $8 billion business per anum in Australia,” says Macnamara.

“Let’s put that figure of $8 billion pa together with the fact that the standard VET teacher spends 20-30% of weekly time on lesson preparation or preparing assessment materials,” says Macnamara, “and you start to see that the development of learning materials consumes many hundreds of millions of dollars every year in VET.”

Twenty years ago a TAFE teacher needed expertise in using an overhead projector and operating a video recorder. Ten years ago the same teacher needed expertise in preparing PowerPoint slides. Five years ago the teacher needed expertise in receiving and sending emails and pointing students to useful websites.

“Today – in the age of customisation and just-for-you services – the teacher needs skills in producing learning materials and assessment tools to suit each and every learner, but can’t keep up,” says Macnamara.

There are two extreme models for developing learning materials. The old model is as follows:

• teacher/trainer hopes that uniform learning materials will suit groups of learners
• teacher develops own learning materials from scratch
• teacher unaware of who else has developed similar materials
• teacher doesn’t know how to buy and sell learning materials.

A new model for developing learning materials is:

• teacher analyses the learning preferences of each learner
• teacher decides what learning materials are to be built and what need to be bought
• teacher accesses online database to identify available learning materials
• teacher pays a modest license fee to use and modify available materials
• teacher decides which learning materials built in-house will be traded.

“There is a lot of reinventing of the wheel going on out there. Practitioners often don’t realise what learning materials already exist and how to get hold of them and legally adapt them,” says Macnamara. On the other hand, Macnamara’s research shows that “practitioners will remix stuff if we make it easy for them to do so”.

The solution is straightforward, says Macnamara: “Practitioners need to assess what resources are available for trading and to take out a licence that allows them to use, and if necessary adapt, the resources to their particular students’ needs. This trading gets materials into learners’ hands quicker."

It is time to resolve the issue of credit transfer for students moving between VET and universities, with Minister Brendan Nelson delivering this ultimatum to universities: “I’ve said to the (higher education) sector: no university is going to get a funding agreement with the Government until I’ve seen its credit transfer arrangements with the VET sector. I don’t care which university.” (The Australian 23-08-04)

Some facts about credit transfer are:

• The number of learners going from TAFE to a NSW university in 2003 was 5750 – or 9.8% of total admissions
• These figures vary greatly from one university to another – ranging from 2.9% to 30% of a university’s admissions
• Only about one third of TAFE graduates admitted to NSW universities received any exemption for their TAFE studies in the period 2000-2002.

In the national TAFE arena, TAFE NSW is vigorously examining options for a smarter approach to credit transfer and to articulation with university qualifications. Robin Shreeve, Deputy Director General of TAFE and Community Services, declared at a recent forum that credit transfer is an issue “that I am particularly passionate about”. Shreeve was blunt: “I remain disappointed that some universities regard TAFE graduates as part of their reserve team – to be called off the bench only when overall applications are falling.” 

At the Sydney forum Shreeve posed some challenging questions for TAFE and universities: “Are we wasting our efforts in particular areas? Are there better ways of working to achieve maximum efficiencies and outcomes for all? Is it inevitable that we adopt a new approach to developing credit transfer and articulation pathways?”

In front of an audience of key personnel from TAFE, NSW universities and a leading UK expert, Shreeve acknowledged the efforts of fellow presenter Dr Dennis Gunning, Director of the Victoria Qualifications Authority on the Credit Matrix model, currently under development and being trialed in Victoria.

Sorting through the various options for solving the credit transfer issue, Shreeve’s major concern is the learner: “I propose a principle that should underpin all our efforts in the area of articulation from TAFE to university and that underpins my comments to you today.  That is: How can we best add value to the learning pathways of our graduates?

Principles TAFE NSW shares with NSW universities, according to Robin Shreeve: 

• we are all committed to educational excellence
• we are all continuing to experience change at an unprecedented rate
• we are all being encouraged by governments of every persuasion to improve articulation between our sectors
• we are all being told to develop new learning pathways that address the changing needs of learners and the changing roles of our sectors.

Robin Shreeve’s tabled these questions about the current effort:

• Are we getting value for money?
• Are the potential benefits from recognition being realised by our learners?
• Are we maximising the potential to be realised from partnerships?
• What new approaches should we adopt to developing credit transfer opportunities and articulation pathways?

Shreeve believes that for credit transfer to be widespread and effective, stakeholders must assume a cooperative responsibility and a sense of ownership. “The will to make credit transfer processes transparent is an essential element. To move forward we need to re-examine our processes for negotiating, establishing and administering credit transfer pathways with universities,” says Shreeve.

I developed these ideas further in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 10 May 2005.

There are indications that the impact of private providers in VET is about to increase. For instance, Minister Hardgrave flagged in Campus Review (6-04-05) that he wanted to correct the flow of funds to “state-run institutions at the expense of alternate type providers”.

Given the likely increase in their profile, it is worthwhile examining the features of the leading private providers in VET. My research suggests that their features include:

• industry specialists with currency and credibility in specific industry sectors
• industry-led in the sense of existing in order to satisfy industry training needs
• unencumbered by bureaucracy, legacy practices and inflexible buildings
• agile in being able to quickly change strategic direction
• commercial expertise in the development of new products and services
• survival depends on customer satisfaction and exceeding the customer’s requirements
• sustainability of the business requires internal efficiency and productivity.

Consider, for example, the Australian Institute of Public Safety (AIPS), a Melbourne-based private provider that offers specialist programs both nationally and overseas in the field of public safety. AIPS has won many awards including the security industry’s Excellence in Training Award and the Australian Violence Prevention Award presented by the Prime Minister.

AIPS offers around forty five VET courses, three degrees and four postgraduate programs. The VET programs include ones provided for risk management personnel in Victoria Police, for loss prevention personnel in Coles Myer Ltd and for serious non-compliance investigators in occupational violence in the Australian Taxation Office.

In response to industry needs, the Institute is focused on training that addresses the issue of aggression in the workplace and other forms of occupational violence. “Organisations urgently need to implement pro-active strategies for prevention, response and recovery,” says CEO Tony Zalewski.

The Institute is regularly commissioned by a variety of public and private sector clients to design, develop and deliver training to upskill staff to manage occupational violence situations. These clients include the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and statutory law enforcement operations such as Parks Victoria Rangers and the City of Melbourne Parking and Traffic Officers. Zalewski finds that historically many of these occupational areas have experienced high levels of violence “due to the nature of the work performed or their client base".

Zalewski believes that the Institute is securing its future through the application of sound business principles such as designing programs in collaboration with the client and strong educational principles such as delivering training in the workplace that addresses real workplace challenges.

I discuss this case study in more detail in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review, 4 May 2005.

To distinguish between the different views on skills shortages, I applied a model developed by the University of Oxford’s Richard Whittington for a presentation I made to the conference in Sydney (20 April  2005) on “Addressing the National Skills Shortage”. Whittington’s model suggests that there are four basic perspectives on strategy, which I describe below and illustrate with an example.

The classical perspective on strategy is the command and control, rationalist view that planning can anticipate market change. From this perspective, skill shortages are a result of imperfect national VET planning structures, so we need to improve our planning. An expression of this perspective was provided in Campus Review (13 April 2005) by the director of employment and training for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), Steve Balzary, who proposed several solutions to the skills crisis, including “Governments need to work more closely with industry to better focus national discussions on strategic issues and the future of Australia’s economic needs rather than on process.”

Proponents of the evolutionist perspective on strategy also focus on economic goals, but are sceptical about the value of long-term plans, believing that markets are too unpredictable to justify a heavy investment in strategic plans. An example of the evolutionist’s acceptance that it is impossible to control external market trends and industry skills needs was provided by Minister Hardgrave in Campus Review (6 April 2005) when he noted as cause of the shortage that “the economy is so strong…industry is demanding so many people”.

The processualist perspective shares with the evolutionists the scepticism about the classical school’s confidence in long-term planning, believing that effective strategies can emerge from everyday operations of organisations: strategies can be crafted on the run. This perspective was voiced by VET commentator Leesa Wheelahan (Campus Review 13 April 2005) who has confidence in the ability of providers to develop strategies: “If the government wants a market in VET then it will have to provide VET institutions with the autonomy they need to compete”.

The systemist perspective is that strategies must be sociologically effective, appropriate for particular social contexts. This perspective was articulated in Campus Review (13 April 2005) by the chair of TAFE Directors’ Australia, Barry Peddle who argued that economic goals need not exclude social ones: “While meeting the needs of industry and employers has to be a key focus, the needs of the individual are paramount.”

Different solutions to the skills shortage can be summarised as follows:

• improve strategic and long-term planning (classicist perspective)
• increase the intake of skilled migrants, to plug gaps (evolutionist)
• accept that economic conditions will always be complex so continually update training plans within every enterprise (processual)
• cater for the unique training needs of social groups such as youth, mature-aged workers and Indigenous people (systemist).

An analysis of public comments on the skills shortage shows that no one perspective is best. Rather, each perspective reflects attitudes to human capacity in VET: we either believe we can deliberately manage ourselves (classical/systemic) or we accept we can’t control all the variables (evolutionary/processual).

The different perspectives also reflect views about what sorts of outcomes are possible in VET: narrowly economic (classical/evolutionary) or plural outcomes (systemic/processual).

The above commentary is an excerpt from my column ‘Inside VET’ from Campus Review, 27 April 2005.

One of my interests as a researcher and analyst in VET is to resist simple generalisations. For instance, my research and experience enables me to resist those who claim that the public provider is dissociated from industry.

Despite recent public calls for VET providers to be more ‘industry-led’, there are numerous examples in VET of providers effectively engaging with industry. A commanding case study is provided by Challenger TAFE in Western Australia, which has transformed itself in recent years to meet industry’s continually changing needs.

In the late 1990s, Challenger TAFE’s performance as a standard government trainer was typified by a narrow training focus, and by campus-based, chalk-and-talk delivery systems. According to Managing Director Malcolm Goff, the College was also faced with an inflexible workforce, multiple layers of management, ‘silo’ structures, high overheads, inflexible business systems and an uninspired approach to relationships with its clients. Most alarmingly, says Goff, the confidence of industry was shaken.

I develop this case study further in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review, 20 April 2005.

After seven years of continuous improvement to its strategies and structures, Goff reports that Challenger TAFE is significantly transformed, driven by a small number of goals including to skill the WA workforce to support industry as it competes in the global economy. “We now focusing on employers and individuals and we clearly have a client-driven culture,” says Goff.

The most dramatic example of Challenger’s enhanced relationship with industry is the creation in recent years of its ten centres of specialisation. The centres are guided by advisory committees, with representation from industry and the community, to ensure products and services are aligned with local and national industry needs.

Through its centres of specialisation, Challenger is closely attuned to industry trends and training requirements. Challenger TAFE is a resounding model of good practice for those VET policy makers and industry leaders who seek examples of providers that are ‘industry led’.

There is increasing pressure on VET providers to find ways to link more closely with industry, to plan and deliver customised training. One my ongoing research interests is to identify different ways these links can be formed.

Forming such links is all the more challenging for large TAFE systems conducted by States or Territories. These systems are historically structured around a retail model of training delivery, where industry is expected to come to the TAFE campus and buy the training solutions that are sitting on the shelves.

These systems find it hard to change their supply-driven model, because the model is based upon historical factors such as the availability of campus facilities that are expensive and long-standing, industrial conditions such as the number of hours staff spend teaching in classrooms and records management such as counting the number of hours students spend in classrooms.

It is even more challenging for TAFE systems to form links with industry where industry is using new technology, because the TAFE providers need to design and deliver training in new fields.

This issue of TAFE-industry links in areas of new technology is the focus of my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 13 April 2005. The column profiles an initiative by the Victorian Government, in funding specialist centres within Victorian TAFE Institutes.  The specialist centres established by the Victorian Government over the past two years support industries such as food processing, transport logistics, motor sports, engineering, printing, biotechnology, manufacturing and hospitality.

One of the nineteen centres established by the Victorian Government is Swinburne University of Technology’s TAFE Centre for New Manufacturing (CNM). The Swinburne Centre was established to collaborate with businesses in the manufacturing technology industry, focusing on new and cutting-edge technologies such as nano-technology, micro-technology and computer aided engineering.

Swinburne’s Centre has now developed alliances with over ten engineering companies including DMG, Festo, Headland Machinery and Marand Precison Engineering. This collaboration has resulted in a high standard of equipment being made available within the Swinburne workshop, enabling students to be trained in the use of the latest technology.

Recent examples of initiatives taken by the Swinburne Centre’s in linking with industry include:

• conducted training needs analysis with Precision Engineering and developed a course for laser operators
• conducted training needs analysis with an industry partner in advanced manufacturing control systems and manufacturing OH&S
• developed courses for company-specific needs: for example, Asi Field Bus Network donated $10,000 for the development of a customised course
• partnered Marand Precision Engineering, MiniFAB and Unidrive to host teachers in industry on release programs
• assisted a research company to develop a sophisticated wire cutting device.

I and others will continue to monitor whether the TAFE Victorian specialist centres, either in their original format or in modified formats, are effective long-term structures for TAFE-industry linkages. The Swinburne model is encouraging.

What were the Prime Minister’s marching orders to the Federal Minister for Vocational and Technical Training? For my column 'Inside VET' in Campus Review (6 April 2005), I interviewed the Minister, the Hon Gary Hardgrave MP. An excerpt follows.

John Mitchell: ANTA’s Paul Byrne believes that there is still work to be done to bed down the core components of the national training system, such as Training Packages, and that the system is still fragile. How do you see the overall condition of the training system?

Minister Hardgrave: Well I suppose it would be wrong of me to say that everything was rosy and everything was just fine, but having said that a lot of things have progressed over the last decade or so. But I think that Paul is right, very much so because the biggest issue, the biggest challenge on my agenda is that we have got eight separate systems of training, eight separate systems of registration, eight separate systems of assessment across so many different trade sectors, let alone the fee-for-service sector, because of the State and Territory base of the training regime.

So despite the progress of getting some national agreements, the implementation of those nationally agreed protocols has not been as good as it could have been. I think there is a lot of work, a lot of heavy lift to be done, to bring industrial awards for instance and the way they impact on wage structures and indeed training structures in all states and territories, in all sectors, more into line.

John Mitchell: The term ‘skills shortages’ has attracted considerable public attention in recent months. What are your views about the causes of the skill shortages?

Minister Hardgrave: As the treasurer said the other week, every parrot in the pet shop has a view on skill shortages. I remember when we came to office in ’96 … (we started) to reinvigorate the whole area of apprenticeships and the whole of logic apprenticeships in the national psyche. So it’s very frustrating to think that now because the economy is so strong and because of the ageing of the workforce, industry is demanding so many people with skills and they want them now.

What’s the causes of it? I actually think that over the last twenty years or so we’ve lost the ambition for people to follow, I guess, in these trades, particularly Dad, into traditional trades. I think we’ve forgotten, we’ve taken it for granted, that the trades we’re really calling out for now are the nation-building trades, they are the core of how you build a strong nation and a sustainable future… I think there’s (been) twenty or twenty five years, possibly more, of psychological neglect when people have talked them down, schools have said go and get a university degree, only “trouble-makers” went and got trades, only people who had no capacity to do something better for themselves went and got trades, so trades became second, third and fourth choice.

John Mitchell: What are some short-term and long-term responses to skills shortages?

Minister Hardgrave: … short term the only quick response is try and hire people from other countries but the trouble is that … similar phenomena have happened in other countries around the world so there are not exactly buyer’s markets for trades people from overseas – we’re competing with other countries.

… in the long term what we’ve got to do is to do … is to reinvigorate a sense of personal success that people can obtain from a trade. There is no doubt in my mind – and my father did a trade, although I didn’t – … that one of the solid bases for your own personal success is by successfully completing all of the disciplines involved in obtaining a trade. It doesn’t matter so much which trade, it is just simply the personal development and benefits that come from completing a trade.

John Mitchell: What is your vision for the future of VET?

Minister Hardgrave: I think the vocational trades are nation-building fundamentals to Australia today and tomorrow. If we can create a set of circumstances where the personal reward a young person feels by taking a VET choice is as strong as the proudest PhD student, then I’ll be a very happy minister.

The Prime Minister has given me – it is the first time ever there has been a Commonwealth minister looking specially at this particular sector – very strong marching orders to reinvigorate the sense of personal attainment and through that underpin Australia’s future prospects. So I think we’ve got to make sure that the system is as agile and as relevant as it possibly can be; to be timely rather than time-based; all those sorts of things; but at the end of it, the big-picture helicopter view is to reinvigorate a personal sense of great achievement in each and every one of those who opt for the trade to create a stronger demand for trade skills in the minds of young people when they make their choices at the end of school.

The Federal Government’s proposed twenty four Australian Technical Colleges represent one model for introducing senior secondary students to industries experiencing skill shortages. However, a model that potentially could have a wider impact than the Technical Colleges was recently launched in South Australia.

The model is the focus of my column Inside VET in Campus Review on 30 March 2005.

The model involves the joint delivery by University SA and TAFE SA of a new course, the Bachelor of Education (Design and Technology Education), which prepares teachers to provide design and technology subjects in secondary schools. The degree course commenced this year and sets a precedent with the delivery of the education methodology components by Uni SA and the technical competencies by TAFE SA.

UniSA Program Director Denise MacGregor says that the program meets a need identified by industry to invest in the education of young people so that they are suitably skilled and knowledgeable to contribute to the economy in areas such as electronics, engineering, building and construction. The new teachers will deliver a range of programs including ‘VET in Schools’ and the ‘Doorways to Construction’ program so that Year 11 and 12 students will see opportunities in the construction industry and other industries.                                                                

According to TAFE SA Manager Dianne Baron, the initiative aims to produce for schools “a new generation of what were formerly known as technical teachers …to implement or expand technical studies at a secondary school level”. The teachers will expose secondary school students to a broad skills base so secondary students can “make informed decisions about their career paths and opportunities in the future,” says Baron.

“Long term the program will not only assist the skills base of students in schools but will assist skills bases related to those trade sectors,” says Baron

Features of the SA model for producing ‘new generation’ secondary school ‘technical teachers’ are as follows:

• Demonstrates ability of three tiers of education to collaborate
• Enjoys strong industry support including scholarships for trainee teachers
• Addresses shortage of ‘technical teachers’ in schools
• Meets senior secondary students’ needs to undertake industry-related courses
• Assists senior secondary students to enter technology-based occupations
• Enables trainee teachers to acquire combined VET and higher education qualifications
• Accesses TAFE’s advanced workshop facilities
• Attracts strong support from schools especially in rural areas.

As a comparatively low-cost way to introduce senior secondary students to technology and related industries, the SA initiative complements the Australian Technical Colleges strategy and provides an alternative model that could be replicated nationally.

This example of an innovative response to skill shortages is expanded upon in my Campus Review column.

Australia’s manufacturing industries contribute over 10% of Australia’s GDP but are subject to intense global pressures, especially from countries with lower wage levels.

The urgent training needs of these industries were the subject of my column Inside VET in Campus Review, published 23 March 2005.

Bob Paton, CEO of the newly formed national Manufacturing Industry Skills Council, describes these pressures: “Manufacturing industries have certainly been the backbone for both domestic and export markets in Australia (but) many of them have been challenged in the last thirty or forty years by global markets and more significantly and more recently by the tightening up of subsidies and tariff regimes, to the point now where many manufacturing industries are competing without any tariff protection or without any favour from government.”

In addition, there are critical skills shortages for trade-based positions including cabinetmakers, electricians, furniture upholsterers, metal fabricators, metal fitters, metal machinists, refrigeration and air conditioning mechanics, sheetmetal workers, toolmakers and welders.

Features of manufacturing industries that contribute to skills shortages include:

• decreasing supply of available young people
• above-average age of employees
• inaccurate perceptions of manufacturing as a career option
• increased choice of career options for all ages
• increased labour mobility
• need for reconfiguration of training opportunities.

The newly formed Skills Council – Manufacturing Skills Australia – is the voice of over 75,000 businesses employing almost one million Australians, and co-ordinates research on manufacturing skills needs. The Council’s activities help the key Australian manufacturing sectors of metals and aerospace, process manufacturing, and textiles, clothing and footwear and furnishing to continue to play a pivotal role in the national economy. These sectors are determined to work smarter, says Paton: “In the last five-ten years there has been a strong focus on working smartly and finding the clever niches that Australian manufacturing can serve. We’re trying to compete with very cheap labour markets from overseas.”

A major response by the Council to the challenges of the global marketplace is the promotion of the new Competitive Manufacturing training package which covers ‘manufacturing practice’ and includes system management skills used at all levels in manufacturing, culminating in the skills needed by people such as manufacturing team leaders and operations managers.

The new training package typifies the Council’s whole-of-industry perspective, says Paton. “We will have a stronger focus on a more of whole-of-manufacturing approach to things and the competitive manufacturing initiative …is really coming home for us now, where we’ve got a range of new qualifications and competencies for people that are applying manufacturing practices across manufacturing, irrespective of the sector.”

Is ANTA handing over to DEST a robust or fragile VET system? Following are excerpts from an interview I conducted recently with Paul Byrne, interim CEO of ANTA. The full report on the interview appears in my column 'Inside VET', in Campus Review, 16 March 2005.

What are some aspects of the national training system that need careful fostering, in the forthcoming DEST era?

Some people have said since it (the abolition of ANTA) was announced…that the transition will be relatively simple and the system will be able to operate perfectly well without ANTA because it is robust and mature. I don’t have that view. I certainly do believe it will be able to continue to operate but I don’t believe it is robust and mature and in some senses it is rather fragile and embryonic. But that is not to say that it is in danger.

But the reason for saying it is not robust and mature is that the nature of the change is quite revolutionary and that is attested to by the fact that so many international visitors come to try and understand and look at and learn from what has been achieved in Australia.  No other country has yet developed a system in which both the providers and industry have clearly defined powers and responsibilities.

There is some concern that DEST will lack the corporate knowledge to manage a smooth transition from ANTA. Is this concern justified?

Well DEST would be the first to agree that they do not have the knowledge at this stage. They’ve looked at our functions and looked their functions and seen that there is virtually no overlap. However obviously DEST and ANTA are working closely together on making sure that is not the case after 30 June, and clearly the intention is that DEST is in a position to pick up all of ANTA’s functions in a seamless way from the middle of the year.

The DEST discussion paper “Skilling Australia – New Directions for Vocational Education and Training” – is a key statement about the future of the sector. What do you see as the paper’s strengths and weaknesses?

I think the paper has all the ingredients for a successful Australian training system post-ANTA. (However) there is critical detail in there which if it was lost – in either the consensus-reaching on the paper or in the implementation – it would make the outcome rather hollow.

I would be measuring with a few measuring sticks….Overall, can it deliver skills for economic and social development in Australia? And important aspects of that to me and things on which I tend to make an assessment are: Does Industry have effective input and leadership…? Will the arrangements for industry input ensure that the right skills are defined and delivered in the system? Will the system be of … consistently high quality? And will it operate in a seamless way nationally and extend internationally?

What are you nervous about (regarding the future of VET)?

If we don’t have a nationally consistent high quality audit and registration system…any retreat to State-based registration or accreditation that does not have national effect would be a backward step. I think there is a real need for auditing to move to outcomes and (for) less emphasis on process and so I’d be concerned if we didn’t end up with not necessarily a single national auditing arrangement but a cooperative arrangements with the States whereby, from the provider’s point of view, you are genuinely registered to operate in every State without further VET requirements. No ifs and buts about that.

The term skill shortages has become very popular in the last six months. Is the term useful or is it distracting the sector from many other issues?

The system has actually prevented skills shortages in many areas. That’s not to say there aren’t skills shortages in some areas, particularly in some traditional trade areas. Now some work has been done on the reasons for the skills shortages and a lot of it goes to factors completely outside of the realm of qualifications being present and providers being ready willing and able to deliver. A lot of it goes to the dearth of candidates for the jobs, for the training, which are due to a whole range of factors that are outside the system that ANTA has been working on.

The High Level Review of Training Packages… positions providers and practitioners as part of the core of VET. How do you see them?

The whole guts of the system is in the providers….I think that it is absolutely essential that providers be seen as the heart and soul of the system. But in saying that it is also fantastic that the users  industry generally and individual enterprises and the people who work in them – are the ones who are saying what it is they need and they are doing it in a quite a formal way through the training packages.

The concentration on structural issues in the recent DEST discussion paper, Skilling Australia, contrasts with the passion of the Secretary of DEST, Lisa Paul, for relationship building - including with teachers - in the VET sector.

I interviewed Lisa Paul recently for my column 'Inside VET', in Campus Review. Following is an excerpt from the column published on 9 March 2005.

Keys to success

Paul acknowledges that the discussion paper does not address cultural issues such as the values and beliefs of participants in the sector: “I think it certainly is true the focus of this paper is on the mechanisms and arrangements for the national training system, so the purpose of this paper was not to spell out DEST’s view of culture for VET.”

However, Paul is aware that hopes and values play a critical role in the sector: “We recognize how vitally important cultural issues and the hopes and values that everyone in the sector shares are to the continuing success of the sector. I know we all share the same values in wanting the best possible VET sector for Australia and I’d like to think like everyone else involved that we have a world-leading, a world-beating national training system, so that the cultural issues and the values we hold and the quality of the teaching in the system are actually the keys to its success.”

Ways DEST proposes to engage with providers will include:

• Continuing ANTA’s FAST FACTS newsletter
• Maintaining the annual ANTA Awards
• Adding the Award category of ‘Practitioner of the Year’
• Providing a new national VET quality agency
• Simplifying the VET system for practitioners and students
• Valuing teaching and teachers’ responsiveness to industry
• Acknowledging providers’ rights to table their views.

The best teachers cater for the needs of each student, and will be supported by the new structures, says Paul: “We know that the best teachers are those who are able to respond to every one of their students in a unique and positive way. We hope that the flexibilities that are built in to the arrangements that we spell out in this discussion paper will support the wonderful range of teachers in the VET system, to be their best.”

Core values

Paul appreciates that the 'High Level Review of Training Packages' project concluded a year ago with an emphasis on a settlement between differing parties within the sector and a commitment to shared values: “I thought the word that was used in the Review of Training Packages, settlement, to be a powerful word. It was a powerful word because right across the country in the VET sector we need to share a set of values about the core features of our national training system and those core features do go to competencies and quality and quality teaching and responsiveness to industry and a range of other core values.”

The new order for VET is dependent upon quality, values and culture: “I can say certainly that the arrangements we spell out in the discussion paper can only succeed if the quality of teaching and the core values and … shared culture in the training system continues to be strong and positive and I am sure it will.”

Paul is determined to engage with providers, declaring “We are committing to the full range of ways that ANTA has engaged with providers.” She cites some practical examples of this commitment: “For example, the ANTA Fast Facts, which the sector regards highly, we will continue. We will continue the Student Satisfaction Survey. And also it is worth pointing out that if a new national VET quality agency is set up that is a terrific way for providers to have their interests addressed.”

Can TAFE adapt quickly to critical skills shortages and changing industry demands? According to the head of the largest TAFE department in Australia, Robin Shreeve, the answer is yes, but the public provider can also improve its performance.

Recently I interviewed Robin Shreeve, the deputy director general (TAFE and Community Education) NSW DET, for my column 'Inside VET', in Campus Review. Following is an excerpt from the column, published on 2 March 2005.

Learning from overseas

In search of improvements, Robin Shreeve recently acted as a guest inspector of a Further Education College in England. There were number of aspects of the quality inspection that were noteworthy for hime: “Number one, the term learner to describe all students, number two the inspectors viewed everything from the learners’ perspective, that is, how well is this college achieving for learners, which is very impressive.”

Shreeve was also impressed with the way the inspection was conducted: “It was very rigorous and it was quite tough on the college and it was certainly resource intensive. I think there were fifteen inspectors in a college far smaller than each one of our Institutes and then all the results were published on the web.” While committed to quality improvement, Shreeve is not convinced of the cost benefits of fifteen inspectors participating for a whole week: “I feel that is a bit over the top, but on the other hand I believe our (quality) arrangements need to be tightened up as many reports have shown in Australia.”

The English experience also reminded Shreeve that “what we’re on about (in VET) is learners”.  He continues: “Something I’d like to import from the UK is the term ‘learner’. I don’t think we should call our learners clients, customers or students.”

Three learner issues

Championing the cause of learners, Shreeve cites three learner-related issues of strong interest to TAFE NSW: graded assessment, learners’ capability and tacit knowledge. First, Shreeve supports graded assessment: “TAFE NSW has always been interested in graded assessment in a competency based framework and we think you can do that, and we think it is important for a variety of reasons. Students and employers like it and demand it and it would make articulation with the university sector so much easier”.

Second, Shreeve likes the new emphasis on learners’ capability: “There is a lot of rhetoric about this at the moment but I really think it hits the mark – people are talking about moving from competence to capability”. Shreeve believes that TAFE NSW, as a VET provider, needs “to be about competence but we also need to be about capability. And to a certain extent this is the old generic/specific skills debate in new terms, but that’s fine if it gets it on the agenda in a new and exciting way”.

Third, Shreeve sees VET helping the learner to integrate explicit and tacit knowledge. Learning in VET is about both “codified and tacit knowledge”. Traditionally, says Shreeve, VET was about “knowing how”, but now learning is about “knowing what, knowing why, knowing how and knowing who”.

One of Shreeve’s hopes for the future is that more time could be allocated to counseling students at the point of enrolment: “One of the things that I find disappointing is that we don’t formally interview every student who seeks to enrol, not because we want to select them, but I just think we could counsel them to make sure they get into the right program.”

Engaging with staff about learning

Another of Shreeve’s passions is engaging with staff about learning: “We are an education and training institution so I am a great believer that we engage staff by talking about teaching and learning.” Shreeve wonders whether TAFE NSW has fully exploited the value of national projects that focus on these topics: “I sometimes worry we haven’t exploited in NSW some of the national projects. I think Reframing the Future and LearnScope have been really good projects because they have been talking about cultural change and they have also been talking about teaching and learning.”

Shreeve is clear that the primary purpose of TAFE as the mass, public provider is to assist learners: “In the debate about whether the function of education and training is skills formation to create human capital or a screening process to get people into good jobs, we buy the human capital argument. And really what TAFE is about is human capital and equity of access to human capital formation: that’s what we are about and that’s critical.”

Despite the international importance of the tourism and hospitality industry, there is a worldwide shortage of qualified and experienced staff. France urgently needs 30,000 cooks and waiters and Switzerland is facing “insurmountable problems” with a shortage of cooks that is “threatening the security of many hotels and restaurants”, according to Derrick Casey, Associate Director TAFE SA Adelaide North Institute, Regency campus. Australia has similar problems, says Casey.

Two common Australian responses to these problems are to train more young people entering the industry or to import qualified staff from overseas. Neither of these strategies has met the more urgent need of addressing the shortage of experienced staff. “There is a shortage of experienced chefs capable of holding a middle to senior kitchen management position, not of new trainees or graduates,” stresses Casey.

Significant numbers of experienced chefs are leaving the industry.  “While we appear to be training sufficient young cooks, we are not retaining them in the industry for long enough to ensure we have a reasonable pool of well experienced chefs or kitchen managers. 50% are lost prior to completion of their apprenticeship. A further 40% are lost within the first 8 years of their career, growing to an estimated 65% within 10 years,” says Casey.

With the support of key industry bodies and leaders, Casey is spearheading an innovative response to this skills shortage. The key strategy is the provision of long-term and structured training for young chefs promoted to the level of kitchen manager or above, as part of a “Young Leaders’ Program”.

Other strategies include changing the way funding is expended on each individual’s training, to better match the learner’s specific needs; the use of an electronic training plan for each learner to monitor individual progress; and the appointment of case managers to design a training plan for each chef.

Casey is confident that these multiple interventions will help retain more experienced staff in this critical industry for the South Australian and Australian economies.

I develop this story further in my Inside VET column in Campus Review - issue of 23 February 2005.

In 2005 I am the lead researcher of a national project called 'Analysing critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment' in VET. This is one of nine projects being undertaken by our consortium on behalf of the NCVER from 2005-2006. The focus of the research program is an examination of 'Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) of the Future'. My fellow researchers in the project on teaching and learning are A/Prof Clive Chappell, Andrea Bateman and Sue Roy.

Introduction

This is the consortium’s major project on teaching, assessment and learning – the core business of providers. The project acknowledges the challenges for VET practice identified by recent projects such as the Enhancing the capability project and the High Level Review of Training Packages project and the challenges reported in other recent research on VET pedagogy, both in Australia and internationally.

The purpose of the project is to identify critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment, in order to inform and influence VET practice. The project will examine learners’ preferences for how they approach their own learning and the implications for teaching practice. The project also will identify examples of good practice and the factors that help and hinder innovation in teaching, assessment and learning.

The research activity will:

• Identify what individual learners and industry clients want from VET in terms of teaching and learning experiences, services and support, and propose how these can best be met.
• Identify the skills needed by VET practitioners in the design of learning programs and resources and in the provision of assessment services to meet the needs of different client groups and propose how these skills might be developed most effectively.
• Summarise the critical success factors – individual, organisational and systemic – in developing and implementing innovative approaches to teaching, learning and assessment in VET providers, and propose how models about good practice might be most effectively transmitted.

Products

• Literature review that examines international and Australian trends in teaching and learning policy and practice
• Discussion paper as the basis for four focus groups
• Commentary on developments in England and Scotland in teaching, learning and assessment
• Description of major VET networks and how they contribute to building and promoting good practice in teaching, learning and assessment
• Fifteen case studies from Australian VET that demonstrate good practice in teaching, learning and assessment
• Two mini-conferences
• Final research report that summarises the findings of the research.

Benefits

VET practitioners will benefit from this research by:

• Finding out about the latest thinking around learners’ preferences, teaching practices and assessment strategies
• Increasing their awareness of the existence and value of networks in VET that focus on teaching, learning and assessment
• Comparing their own experiences with those recorded in the fifteen case studies
• Understanding factors that affect innovation in teaching, learning and assessment.

Simple ideas are often underpinned by sophisticated principles. This statement applies to a staff development initiative that commenced in 2004 at one of Australia’s high profile RTOs, TAFE NSW Northern Sydney Institute (NSI). The simple idea was to design, promote and conduct professional conversations among teaching staff.

Margaret Dix, the Institute’s R/Manager, Staff Learning and Development, explains the strategic need which led to the series of conversations: “Our Head Teachers expressed the opinion that there was a need for a greater emphasis on quality teaching and learning. Teacher’s practices needed to change and they particularly needed to embrace student-centred learning. But teachers were so busy actually doing their jobs there wasn’t time for learning how to do it better.”

Dix was also aware that teachers wanted to change, but lacked the time: “Practitioners have continually lamented that the quantity of planning and doing means that there is little time for them to check and act. There is little time to complete Kolb's experiential learning cycle by being what Schon calls a reflective practitioner,” she explains.

Having identified the willingness for change, Dix set out to find a strategy that would “allow teachers the time and space to talk to each other and to share their stories and practice across the Institute.”

With change agency funding from Reframing the Future and support from her Unit, Dix invented and implemented a strategy she called a “conversation space”, where members of the Unit regularly facilitate structured professional conversations at lunch time, around the Institute’s campuses. “The sparks that we use to encourage the conversation focus the conversation around topics that are current and sometimes challenging for VET delivery and assessment,” she says.

The conversations range over subjects such as holistic assessment, key competencies, the competitive VET market, funding, new qualifications and adult learning theory. 

There are immediate benefits, says Dix:  “Teachers feel energized. A conversation space introduces teachers to their peers and creates a network for sharing. It is reflective. It is based on goodwill. It enables teachers to review their practice about what they are doing and what they might do.”

Research and NSI’s experience shows that structured, professional conversations enable practitioners to:

• collaborate, reflect and clarify
• analyse challenges and identify solutions
• share successes and examine lessons learnt
• create the conditions for change and transform practice.

I extend this story in my Inside VET column in Campus Review, 16 February 2005.

Industry skills councils set up by ANTA - mostly in late 2004 - are an important part of the fabric of the national VET sector.

The councils are starting to develop innovative new products and processes to assist industry training. For example, Innovation and Business Skills Australia (IBSA) has already commissioned a report on identifying the link between the digital content industry and national training packages. The digital content industry ranges from digital publishing to interactive multimedia, virtual reality and website development. As a result of the report, IBSA, in conjunction with industry and other stakeholders, is reviewing all the training packages units with digital content, within its portfolio of eleven training packages.

IBSA’s cross-industry approach to digital content is made possible because it has assumed the responsibilities of five former national industry training boards, covering finance, printing, business services, information technology, telecommunications and the creative industries. IBSA has also taken responsibility for the fundamental industry in VET, education. IBSA’s response to the digital content industry exemplifies IBSA’s strategic mindset.

Another major initiative of IBSA is the creation of an integrated framework of competencies and qualifications, that appears very different to the linear list of competencies set out in a training package. For instance, in the creative industries, an employer or an individual could look at the integrated framework and decide to focus on a combination of sector-specific qualifications, say in multimedia, balanced by some other units, such as in small business, administration or sustainability. IBSA’s CEO, Sharon Coates, believes this integrated framework will enable industry to structure training in ways that are relevant to their immediate needs and will also accommodate industry’s changing skill needs in the future.

I develop this story further in my Inside VET column in Campus Review, edition 9 February 2005.

One industry clearly affected by global change is the broadcast industry and organisations such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are experiencing massive challenges. Jenny Ferber, Head of ABC Learning, says areas that are expected to experience the most change include media technologies, government requirements and audience expectations. “In response, we are quickly embracing digital technology and learning to use new tools to produce content for the new audiences which are coming through digital TV, the broadband internet and other platforms,” says Ferber.

Ferber believes that, in order to ensure its future, the ABC “needs to develop the capability to continually reinvent itself as a leading media presence.” This capability, she says, includes building a flexible and talented workforce, keeping up to date with new technologies and acquiring the skills to develop, deliver and broadcast leading-edge programs.

The ABC is a RTO, able to deliver fourteen different VET qualifications. Ferber considers that there is potential for an ongoing role for VET qualifications within the ABC, as the regularly needs new staff, many of whom arrive with university degrees, to develop technical skills. “We need the skills of knowledge workers combined with high-end technical skills. For instance, we might employ as a presenter someone with a PhD in agriculture, but the person needs to know how to conduct an on-air interview and operate  a control panel,” she says.

Ferber considers that the ABC and the VET system face similar challenges: “This need to identify competencies that capture soft skills, knowledge and attitudes and the need to allow for rapid change and flexibility are also the challenges that will be faced throughout the VET system over the next few years,” she says.

This story has many dimensions: for example, accommodating a national qualifications system within a progressive enterprise; and managing learning and workforce development within an enterprise affected by mammoth change. I expand on this story in my column in Campus Review, published 26 January 2005.

An issue currently on the VET stage is how best to support learners in acquiring competencies in language, literacy and numeracy (LLN). The issue is under the spotlight primarily because the conventional method of delivering LLN programs – using specialist LLN staff detached from mainstream training packages – does not suit either workplace learners or enterprises.

While researchers, policy makers and training package developers acknowledge that LLN need to be integrated with the delivery of each specific vocational program, such as engineering or tourism, leaders are needed to translate these good intentions into actions. One VET professional providing leadership in the integration of LLN programs with training packages is South Australian Technical and Further Education South Australia (TAFE SA) educational manager Wing-Yin Chan Lee, based at Adelaide City Campus.

Chan Lee promotes the concept of “shared responsibility” for LLN between enterprises and the deliverers of LLN. Chan Lee also promotes the concept of the “integrated delivery and assessment” of LLN in VET. Providing an integrated approach where LLN specialists collaborate with the deliverers of other vocational programs is also a challenge because it involves both parties changing their pedagogy.

Chan Lee provides the following advice on how to integrate LLN with vocational training:

• trainers and assessors as well as LLN specialists need to understand how LLN interconnect with vocational skills
• trainers and assessors as well as LLN specialists need to develop teaching and learning strategies that are appropriate for each learner and setting
• systemic resources and policies are needed to support collaboration between LLN specialists and vocational trainers.

I extended this portrait of a change agent at work, in my column in Campus Review, Wednesday 2 February.

Providers of training packages sometimes focus exclusively on the individual learner’s development of new competencies, however new models are emerging in VET for how providers can also align training packages with the achievement of business goals.

The twin goals of assisting skill development and meeting the business needs of industry are contained in the official but awkward definition of training packages: “Training packages are an integrated set of nationally endorsed standards, guidelines and qualifications for training, assessing and recognising people’s skills developed by industry to meet the training needs of an industry or group of industries.” While these twin goals are officially promoted, in practice the emphasis is usually placed on supporting the individual’s skill development, with fingers crossed that business benefits will emerge later.

Consciously using training packages to achieve business outcomes is a focus of a major Australian company, Boral Australian Construction Materials – a registered training organisation (RTO) for the last eight years. I profile Boral's approach in my weekly column in Campus Review (edition 19 Jan 2005).

Boral offers its staff around Australia the chance to access twenty six qualifications from eight different training packages. With two hundred workplace trainers and assessors in place, in 2004 Boral’s national training managers decided to improve workplace training and assessment through customising the competencies described in training packages. The training managers also decided to improve the alignment of training packages with both the needs of individual staff members and with Boral’s business needs. In my column I explore some examples of how Boral training managers approached these tasks.

The Boral training model includes these ingredients:

• Goal: to have highly skilled people to assist Boral’s strong performance in the global economy.
• Method: develop connections between national competency standards, workplace outcomes, performance benchmarks, business key performance indicators (KPIs) and improvements in the capabilities of front-line employees.

Ultimately, Boral provides the VET sector with a model for linking training packages with both individual skill development and business benefits.

Training organisations in Australian vocational education and training (VET) are under increasing pressure to become more agile and customer-focused, to meet the growing demands of industry.

A conventional response to such pressure on staff in RTOs is to provide professional development through one-off workshops. But the use of workshops as the primary strategy for professional development is no longer acceptable to some RTOs, especially in those RTOs where staff are distributed over very large distances.

As a result, coaching, rather than frequent workshops, is now a standard methodology for professional development within one TAFE Institute I profile in a coming article in Campus Review (edition 12 Jan 2004).

Over the last six months this Institute provided professional development for sixty of its line managers in the skills of coaching. For this Institute, coaching includes the following elements:

• involves the development of a trusting, structured relationship
• aims to facilitate learning and to foster and support change
• includes negotiated expectations and agreements
• respects the client’s self-determination
• requires coaches to have or to acquire specific competencies.

To ensure coaching is placed on a sound footing within the Institute, staff developed a range of documented tools including an explanation of coaching, a coaching agreement, a checklist of core competencies for coaches and a self-evaluation questionnaire for those to be coached.

Here’s my roundabout Christmas message.

Currently I am preparing newspaper articles on the following aspects of vocational education and training (VET):

• the innovative use of coaching to assist complex staff development needs in a geographically distributed registered training organisation (RTO);
• the insights of a VET thought-leader who heads up the training division of a large organisation that is bearing the brunt of global technology changes;
• the subtle skills of a VET HR manager in the use of professional conversations;
• the determination of a middle-level manager in an RTO, in championing nationally the cause of language, literacy and numeracy.

I will attempt in these articles to reflect the values, energy, skills and knowledge of some very different VET practitioners.

These inspired VET practitioners deserve public recognition and respect, as they are a key to the future vitality of the VET system. While we need policies and structures, buildings and equipment, the most valuable asset in the VET system is the group of practitioners who inhabit it. Let’s particularly celebrate the leadership provided by those outstanding VET practitioners, like the four I am writing about, who demonstrate what is possible.

The evaluation of learning is a critical issue, for if we don’t evaluate then we are not measuring whether learning has occurred.

I am currently commencing a project – within a large organisation with branches in most States and Territories – to assist its learning evaluators to develop new skills. There is enough time available for the project to assist participants from around Australia to develop skills and knowledge not just in the basics of evaluating learners’ reactions and whether they acquire new skills and knowledge, but also to assist participants to measure whether the learning affects job and organisational performance.

This is a rare opportunity to work with learning evaluators over an extended period time, as many educators and learning and development managers are focused narrowly only on immediate learning and questions such as: Did participants benefit from the face to face instruction? Can they demonstrate a new skill? Can they articulate new understanding?  However, there are many more challenging questions that can be asked three-six months after a training event, such as: Are participants able to demonstrate they still have the initial competency? Can we identify any benefits for the organisation from the training program? What was the return on the investment in training?

For learning evaluators to be able to learn to measure the long-term effects of training, I find a comprehensive professional development program is required, which delves into the deep layers of evaluation. These deeper layers involve developing knowledge and skills in areas such as: 

• developing an evaluation framework for any training program
• designing and implementing evaluation tools
• analysing and reporting on the data, for multiple audiences.

The forthcoming professional development program will also create the conditions for participants to share their experiences and learn from their peers, in an atmosphere of trust and goodwill. This collaborative approach is vital, as there is so much for each individual to learn about evaluation, and learning from peers is invaluable. One primary participants will learn is that evaluation is an art as well as a science, as evaluators are commonly required to adapt tools and strategies to fit the culture and setting of an evaluation. Evaluation requires the exercise of professional judgment and sensitivity.

This need to exercise judgment will be of concern to those who believe that evaluation tools can be robotically pulled down from a website, without any modifications. Making the modifications to existing templates is just one of the high-level skills required in an effective approach to evaluation.

Over the last three months I assisted a State-wide educational organisation to develop a strategy for knowledge management. Today we held the final workshop for the project, at which I tabled for consideration the final draft of the strategy.

It was an inspiring workshop as it contained all the elements of high-level professionalism: passion, commitment, debate, determination and the shared value of assisting students to learn.

I mention these cultural issues because developing a KM strategy is much more than a mechanistic or technological undertaking, as it requires participants involved in the development of the strategy to consider what might be, for them, new practices, such as:

• examining one’s own tacit knowledge and attempting to make it explicit
• sharing, not withholding, knowledge
• generating new knowledge in concert with others
• trusting that the new knowledge will be treated with respect, not exploited
• accepting the uncertain outcomes of developing new knowledge
• networking with others, not running a solo race.

Some lessons I draw from this particular group of professionals are as follows:

• knowledge management, involving systems for generating, sharing and storing knowledge, is first and foremost a human activity
• knowledge management as a human activity is more about emotions, thoughts and relationships than about technological systems
• as a human activity, knowledge management will be approached differently by each group of people
• and as human knowledge is fluid, changing over time and in different people’s hands, knowledge management needs to be a continuous activity, and energy and commitment are required to sustain it.

This analysis will frustrate those who hope to find simple keys to knowledge management or the five easy steps to knowledge management. But this analysis will encourage those who see in the individuals and groups in an organisation the potential for managed knowledge to drive innovation and the continuous improvement of service provision.

Today I spent four hours in conversation with a good friend visiting from the UK who is the head of staff development in a very large international organisation. I had the pleasure of recently undertaking an assignment for his organisation in London, so I was keen for an update.

What struck me about this conversation was its similarity with a conversation I had yesterday with a Melbourne-based Australian in a similar role to him – a conversation which I summarized in my last weblog. This similarity indicates a number of things:

• that industries are becoming increasingly similar around the globe, so challenges in London are challenges in Melbourne or Sydney;
• that Australia is very much part of a global economy, so our work skills and quality levels and work outputs need to be world class, or we will fall behind. 

The conversation was invaluable for checking with him on the pressures on his organisation and the implications for learning and development. He indicated that the pressures on the creative industry in which he works are multiple and include the following:

• increasing competition from other suppliers
• increasing expectations from the government and other stakeholders
• increasing demand from customers
• increasing options made possible by new technologies.

A number of other points he made included:

• if his organisation stops innovating it will quickly become redundant
• creating new knowledge is critical to innovation
• to be innovative, organisations need to be driven by values and vision
• skill development is not a luxury in his organisation and in his creative industry: it is a necessity
• leadership continues to be a critical issue in his organisation, for without it the shared corporate vision will flounder
• change management that has 'heart' is essential in a vibrant organisation
• creating a coaching culture amongst managers is one of the most powerful ways of exchanging knowledge down the line.

He also commented on the value and success of coaching within his organisation – a major organisational focus over the last year. While he values mentoring and provides mentoring for a number of mentees, he sees a difference between coaching and mentoring:

“Coaching is non-directive, asking the person I am coaching to describe his or her goals, realities, options and likely responses and therefore owning the goals and targets by allowing the coachees to work it out for themselves. Mentoring is more about using your experience and knowledge as a mentor to help the mentee see the way forward and giving him or her the confidence to make different decisions or the breadth to see a more rounded context for work.“

The overall message from this conversation is that Australian organisations need to continue to improve both their skill levels and creativity, to ensure a viable future. Indeed skill development and creativity should go together: one is an indispensable adjunct to the other.

Today I interviewed the training manager of a large national organisation for a series of articles I am preparing on thought leaders in vocational education and training (VET) in Australia. She shared insights which are in stark contrast to the politically-based thoughts of those who would prefer to worry mostly about the bureaucratic arrangements in VET. 

Refreshingly, she talked about:

• her organisation as a knowledge enterprise that needs to foster a culture of innovation and creativity if the organisation is to meet increasing customer demand
• the need for her organisation to achieve sustainability and renewal
• the need for all Australian enterprises to encourage innovation, to ensure we become or stay world class
• the necessity for organisations to benchmark with others, to measure organisational growth
• the benefits of balancing quality and flexibility in the provision of training
• the need for her organisation to balance the development of technical competencies with the development of generic skills such as problem solving and communication
• the challenge of managers providing leadership
• the challenge of facilitating meaningful workbased learning.

The interviewee is excited about the potential for change through education and training and is confident that organisations like her own could bring about change, but is mindful of the complexities involved. Her mindset and the quality of her thinking are vital to the future of not just Australian industry but also of the VET sector.

Indigenous organisations sometimes need to overcome challenges in order to obtain optimum benefits from the national VET system. The challenges often stem from the need to reconcile their organisations’ customary ways of operating with the compliance requirements of a nationally-regulated training system.

Two different but positive examples of Indigenous organisations developing new approaches to training that fit with the national system are provided by Goolarri Media Enterprises in Broome, Western Australia and the Nyangatjatjara Aboriginal Corporation, based around Uluru in the Northern Territory. Both organisations were involved in change management projects in 2004 as part of the Reframing the Future program.

Goolarri Media Enterprises has forty staff in Broome and operates a community radio station, a television station, a music recording studio and a live music and events venue. At the start of 2004, and as a newly registered training organisation (RTO), Goolarri wanted to prepare for its first quality audit for the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF), but without abandoning its uniquely indigenous culture.

A separate change agency project was undertaken in 2004 by Chris McAleer from Jobs Australia Ltd in Melbourne, who traveled north to work with a remote indigenous community organisation, the Nyangatjatjara Aboriginal Corporation. The Corporation has five business units, including a hospitality operation at Uluru, that generate a range of training requirements and has identified the need either to become an RTO or to partner existing RTOs.

As with the Goolarri project, McAleer focused on the need to align the requirements of the AQTF with the indigenous organisation, as the training needs to be culturally appropriate.

The development of these effective training models for indigenous organisations is the focus of my column in Campus Review, for publication on 15 December 2004. The positive stories counter the recent negative or controversial press on indigenous issues.

Despite the various national reports I have published on the matter for ANTA, NCVER and NOIE, I find that most VET organisations resist developing comprehensive plans for operating as e-businesses. Curiously, these organisations sometimes spend millions of dollars on e-learning developments or they tinker with some aspects of e-business, such as freshening their website’s homepage, but they avoid developing a thorough strategic framework for e-business.

I am currently assisting a national VET organisation to develop a strategy and a project plan for becoming an e-business. My client has recognised the value of such strategic positioning, having determined that most of the organisation’s customers are online and they expect services to be available online. The benefits for my client are fundamental to its survival as a business, as e-business can assist the organisation to

• provide its products and services nationally, 24x7
• enhance its profile and brand name
• widen its market share
• increase its efficiencies
• reduce its costs
• improve its speed of customer response
• and link more effectively to its suppliers.

Why would VET managers ignore these organisational benefits of e-business? I recently completed a substantial body of research in which I found that managers’ resistance to embracing e-business can be explained in part by the fact that managers need skill development and new conceptual frameworks to develop e-business strategies and processes. My research details the range of skills and the types of knowledge required and describes the extensive professional development needed to address the issue.

But it is not just a matter of professional development. My research also identifies a number of organisational factors, industry factors and technological factors that are barriers to the development of e-education in Australian VET. E-business is alluring and important, but not easily obtained by educational organisations.

One of my business activities is providing advice on how to prepare tender bids or proposals. I commonly prepare written submissions for my clients and recently I conducted a one-day workshop on this topic area for a consortium of five educational organisations.

While I am interested and experienced in the technical aspects of tenders and proposals, and regularly assist people to develop them, I am also focused on the strategic dimensions of these activities. For instance, on a surface level, the necessary skills, knowledge and attitudes to prepare tenders/proposals include an ability to conduct research and write clearly; knowledge of the client and of the project area proposed; and an attitude that the project will be undertaken in a business-like manner. However, my experience shows that a manager needs to acquire a deep understanding of the strategic aspects of tendering, including:

• Analysing contract issues, options and potential complications. Managers need to examine all the issues raised by a tender call or a planned proposal, including the possible negative consequences of winning the assignment.
• Seeing contracts from the client’s perspective and understanding client needs and priorities. While a tender topic might be appealing, the tenderer needs to put more work into anticipating what the client wants from the project, not what the tenderer wants to do.
• Planning an effective partnership between client and contractor. Undertaking an assignment is not a matter of the successful tenderer working in isolation: it is a matter of working in partnership with the paying client.

In the workshop I conducted recently for the five organisations, we applied an extensive strategic framework to an actual possibility for the consortium: a call for expression of interest which was advertised in the national media a few days earlier, to establish a technical college for the Commonwealth Government. Using a strategic framework and a series of demanding questions I put to the group, and over a few hours of analysis and discussion, the consortium decided not to respond to the advertised invitation. The workshop demonstrated that a strategic approach can help you to avoid pitfalls and it can also help you write winning proposals and tender submissions.

These types of strategic skills in preparing tenders and proposals will become increasingly necessary in the vocational education and training (VET) sector, as more funding is expected to become available for competitive tendering.

Assisting mature-aged workers to develop competencies is a new policy goal in many VET jurisdictions, but there are challenges in providing these workers with appropriate and timely training. Challenges arise for different reasons: the mature-aged learners may be unused to accessing structured training; enterprises may be unfamiliar with identifying the training needs of its mature-aged employees; and the VET provider may be inexperienced in customising training for this new cohort of learners.

In my column for next week’s Campus Review, I discuss a case study where a VET provider needed to accept these challenges and was also faced with demanding new targets from its State Training Authority for meeting the needs of workers over the age of forty four. The VET provider set out in 2004 to develop a model of how to partner with industry to target the training needs of mature-aged workers.

The educator within the VET provider who led the model-building was undertaking a change agency program, for which I am the mentor. To provide an initial theoretical framework she drew on her background with “community development theories and models, which are all about achieving engagement, empowerment and transformation, both at a personal and/or structural level”.

The change agent then developed a framework for managing change, based on an amalgam of existing change management theories. The framework included winning initial “buy-in” to the change process from her colleagues, establishing a sense of urgency, creating a readiness for change, forming a vision for the future, developing a strategic plan, gaining political support and generating short-term wins.

The article then describes the industry partnership which provided a short-term win. The article concludes by suggesting that all large VET providers need to develop an organisation-wide strategy for addressing the issues surrounding mature-aged workers as learners.

One of the major challenges facing VET is to shift as much training as possible from campus-based classrooms to the workplace, to increase the relevance, value and immediacy of learning. This shift requires collaboration between providers and industry, particularly where the industry is used to classroom-based delivery.

One industry that still relies heavily on traditional classroom-based training is the baking industry, with apprentices routinely dispatched several times a year to distant campuses for blocks of training. However, the baking industry is characterised by variable work hours and a high number of casual employees, so staff often have difficulties accessing institution-based training.

A group of researchers and VET practitioners set out this year to investigate flexible learning options that would suit the baking industry, enabling more learning in the workplace.

Ninety students studying the Baking trades course volunteered to participate in the project and the researchers split them into two groups. The first group was called the face-to-face group, for whom content was delivered in a teacher-centred traditional learning environment.

The second group was designated the hybrid group and involved the use of what the team called blended learning. These students were given tasks to complete before each lesson, in the workplace, with the tasks delivered via SMS, email, a blog and a web site. The lessons conducted on campus for the hybrid group were student-centred and self-paced, where the teacher functioned as a facilitator and mentor.

The researchers compared the knowledge and skill level of the two groups after a series of learning activities and found that the hybrid or blended learning model resulted in higher levels of learning than the traditional face-to-face model.

The above research is the focus of my column in Campus Review, to be published on 1 December 2004.

Yesterday I assisted with the convening of a national forum on staff development in VET. In one of the sessions I attended, the three speakers came from very different backgrounds, but interestingly each made the same major point.

The speakers were from the funeral, cement and telecommunications industries, but each of them reported that the best way to market the advantages of training within their organistions was to point to the benefits for the business from training. Some even talked about pointing to the possibilities of improving the enterprise's bottom line.

Other findings included the following:

• it is better to talk about KPIs than competencies
• it is better to talk about the potential to improve profit than to talk about how many staff gained a qualification.

This positioning of training as a key to business success is in contrast to the traditional approach, which was, crudely, that if the educator thought training was good for staff, then it must be.

Today I finished drafting my next column for Campus Review. The column addresses the issue of how to set strategic directions in a time of great change.

Management textbooks extol the virtues of clarifying the organisation’s strategic directions, so that the organisation’s resources and efforts can be focused on a small number of achievable goals. However, my ongoing research shows that determining strategic directions is becoming an increasingly complex task for registered training organisations in VET, as their external environments are becoming more turbulent.

Recently I was asked to assist the senior managers of a large regional TAFE institute to clarify its strategic directions for 2005. From my first contact with the institute, I quickly learnt that not only did the institute have thin markets, multiple stakeholders and a population distributed over a large geographical area, but it was also undergoing a comprehensive restructure of staff positions.

In the past such an institute might have put up the shutters and informed its constituencies that there would be no change to strategic directions until the restructure was completed. Not so in the case of this institute, as the imperative to meet new and changing client demands requires continuous strategic flexibility.

Being able to set new strategic directions in the face of swirling change is no longer an expectional skill for contemporary managers in VET: it is a necessary skill.

Tomorrow I am conducting a workshop on developing a knowledge management (KM) strategy. In any such workshop the organisational barriers to KM need to be discussed.

Some common barriers are as follows:

• a lack of practice in sharing information systematically across the organisation
• a preference for gossip
• a reliance on a few individuals for information
• inconsistent approaches to managing information from one section to the next
• irregular dissemination of news within the organization
• different definitions of good practice
• tensions between sections within the organisation
• a long-standing distrust of head office.

Patently, the major obstacles to  the development of KM strategies are cultural.

Currently I am assisting a statewide educational service provider to develop a knowledge management (KM) strategy.

One of the fascinating challenges in a KM project is to balance those staff who prefer to focus on tacit knowledge with those who prefer to focus on explicit knowledge.

Some practitioners prefer to consider the nature and benefits of tacit knowledge. These personnel believe strongly in developing processes to nurture the processes of social communication. They value conversation, networking and sharing and only place a secondary emphasis on the use of IT.

Other practitioners prefer to focus on explicit knowledge. These personnel believe strongly in developing processes to capture, order, store and retrieve knowledge, by using IT systems. They value knowledge that can be documented and they like to develop systems that use databases. 

Both perspectives are valuable and necessary in developing and implementing a KM strategy.

Today I drafted my column which will appear in Campus Review on 17 November, on the topic of continuously improving strategy. The article begins by asking how does a prestigious training organisation respond, the year after it wins VET awards for excellence? The response of TAFE NSW Sydney Institute in 2004 was to vigorously embark on a comprehensive range of strategy-making initiatives aimed at continuously improving its performance. 
 
After winning the large RTO of the Year Award in NSW and other key awards in 2003, the Institute was confronted by the need to amalgamate two very large colleges from the former TAFE NSW Southern Sydney Institute with the existing six colleges from Sydney Institute. This amalgamation enlarged the population in the Institute’s geographical area to 1.25m and greatly increased the range of local economic and community development issues. Meanwhile the Institute needed to continue to respond to the complex training needs of this global city in fields such as business, finance, insurance, transport, warehousing, logistics and tourism.

The article describes the way the senior managers at the Institute defined the strategic challenges within the organization, then planned a wide-ranging set of activities to meet those challenges. The Institute emerges from this article as the opposite of one might expect of the largest VET Institute in Australia: the Institute emerges as agile, responsive, creative, inclusive and decisive in its strategy-making.

The Commonwealth Government’s recent initiatives indicate that industry will have a much higher profile in VET decision-making. While industry obviously needs and deserves a prominent role in VET, an ideal arrangement is that all the stakeholders have a voice, as VET is like an ecological system containing many interdependent components. Interdependence means that we need each other.

The interdependence of industry clients and training providers is one of the key issues which emerged from research I am currently completing. The research project was funded by the Applied Research Program of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, and the report’s title is ‘Implementing flexible learning in workplaces’. This 2004 research study set out to identify the strategies used by a registered training organisation (RTO), the Central West Community College (CWCC), to implement flexible learning in the workplaces of two enterprises, a prominent food processing plant in Bathurst and a large abattoir in Wagga Wagga. The study also set out to identify the collaborative partnership model between the RTO and the enterprises and how that model assisted the implementation of flexible learning.

The report describes the multiple contexts in this VET study, including the regional context, the industry context, the enterprise context and the training provider context. The report demonstrates that the different bodies involved in these contexts – such as regional industries, local enterprises, local training providers and regional development organisations – are inter-dependent: that is, if learning is to contribute to a stronger regional economy, these different parties need to work together. A potential benefit of such collaboration is the design and support of learning activities that address industry skill needs and can be provided at times and in locations that suit local enterprises.

I develop this story further in the issue of the Campus Review to be published on 10 November. The full report will be available later this year at http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au

A good colleague in the VET community, Peter Smith from Deakin University, has consistently focused attention on the issue of learners needing to be self-directed if they are to succeed with e-learning. I am currently preparing a research report which reinforces this point.

Proponents of VET online products and services need to target self-directed and verbal learners, not non-verbal learners who prefer instructors and demonstrations. For instance, Smith (2000, 2001) showed that apprentices prefer learning in structured environments that provide opportunity for direct social interaction with their fellow learners and with their instructors. These learners also exhibited a low preference for learning that is presented through verbal means such as reading or listening. Verbal learners are those who prefer learning through the spoken or written word. The strong preference of the apprentices, as non-verbal learners, was for learning through hands-on experience, demonstrations and practice. 

Mitchell, Latchem, Bates and Smith (2001) point out that teachers are normally able to identify those students who are self-directed and those who are not. Self-directed students ask challenging questions, not just about program structure and what is expected of them, but about the content, what it means, and how it can be applied. They tend to go beyond what is delivered in instruction; and show greater willingness to work independently, and to access resources beyond those the instructor provides. Providers need to be able to identify self-directed learners and to market e-learning to them. 

Fortunately self-directed learning can be nurtured. Smith (2001) has suggested a wide range of strategies for the development of self-directedness in VET learners, focusing largely on assisting them to:

• use their experience and prior knowledge to develop new knowledge
• set their own learning goals and monitor achievement
• adopt a problem solving approach to new learning and its applications
• broaden the range of learning resources they make use of
• use other people to assist them where necessary to understand new learning.

I am currently writing up a research report on the implementation by a training provider of flexible learning approaches in enterprise workplaces in regional NSW.

The research identifies the range of contexts and the complex set of factors that impinge on an implementation of flexible learning. This contrasts with the simplistic use of throughaway terms by the media recently, like ‘ increasing skills training', as if that is a matter of pulling a lever or two. In terms of different contexts, I map out the regional contexts (two regions are involved); the industry context (two); the enterprise context (two); and the training provider's context.

One of my key findings is that the stakeholders representing these different contexts are interdependent. The range of different stakeholders, from government advocates of regional development to industry spokespeople to enterprise leaders and training providers, need and want to work together to support regional development and skill development. The RTO involved is determined to leverage off the interdependent relationship it has with the other stakeholders, to develop improved strategies and models for supporting flexible learning within local workplaces.

Implementing flexible learning in regional enterprises requires sophisticated management.

I have just drafted my column for Campus Review, due for publication on Wednesday 3 November, on issues around VET in Schools. The column makes the point that, no matter how well the Government’s new technical colleges perform, there will continue to be a need for a range of models for providing VET in Schools, to meet the breadth of demand. A variety of models for providing VET in Schools that result in VET-qualified, highly-motivated and employable school leavers will be highly valued around Australia.

The column discusses an outstanding example of VET in Schools in Queensland, between a high school and a private Registered Training Organisation.

The column shows that multiple success factors underpin this effective model for VET in Schools, as follows:

• First, the State Government provided policy-level encouragement for schools to find new ways to provide VET programs for their students.
• Second, the school formed a partnership with an experienced external provider that has a track-record of equipping students for the industry and has a philosophy that young people can learn while enjoying their learning.
• Third, the external RTO not only has extensive experience in the child care industry, it also has the skills to collaborate with school personnel.
• Fourth, real jobs are available for students with the nationally accredited qualification in child care, inspiring the students.
• And finally, the VET program was specially adapted by the school and the RTO to suit the specific cohort of learners, to ensure its relevance to the school students.

Such strong examples of good practice are very important to promote in the VET sector, to assist with the continued improvement of VET in Schools programs.

I am have just completed a report for an Enterprise-based Registered Training Organisation (RTO) on how it might expand in order operate across a wider range of different organisations that recently merged to be part of the one enterprise.

As is so often the case, the structural functionalist issues, while complex, are easier to resolve than the cultural issues. The structural functionalist issues include who does what, when and how; who makes the decisions and how; and how will the funding be managed. Such issues are complex within this enterprise for the RTO, as the enterprise consists of many formerly independent bodies who were forcibly amalgamated. However, eventually it will be possible to develop formal agreements on the structural functionalist issues.

My research shows that the more difficult issues are cultural:

• Starting with the issue of trust, can one party be trusted to provide the coordination of training across the multi-site network?
• Another cultural issue is the resistance of local staff to any changes in the way training is provided, based on a fear that new approaches to training will not suit them.
• A further cultural issue is that of shared understandings: different groups of staff have shown that they have different understandings and expectations of what an internal RTO can provide.

Because cultural issues abound, change management skills are essential for those managing the repositioning of the RTO.

Currently I am writing up the results of research I have conducted over the last four months.

The focus of the research is to identify new and transferable strategies of VET-related training and assessment practice in the workplace for the meat and food processing Industries, involving the use of a range of flexible learning methods.

The potential implications of this research for the industries and enterprises include:

• revised policies about flexible learning for industry and government bodies
• enhanced flexible learning opportunities for the meat and food industries through the development of a model for accessing flexible learning in collaboration with external providers
• new, practical and achievable solutions for industry to address problems in training and assessment
• increased participation of industry in the Australian flexible learning community
• improved training and hence improved productivity for rural and regional industries
• improved partnerships between industry, RTO and industry advisory bodies
• innovative models of industry-based flexible learning transferable to other enterprises and other industries in regional Australia.

The final report will be available from www.flexiblelearning.net.au in about six weeks.

Tomorrow, Thursday 14 October 2004, I am presenting a paper - as lead author - at the Australasian Evaluation Association’s Annual Conference in Adelaide. The paper is on comparative methodologies to measure the return on investment on training.

One of the methodologies I will report on is that of assessing the value for money. The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO 2002) defines value for money as a judgement of the worth of funds expended in the light of the benefits received (p.84). Types of VFM evaluation types noted by the ANAO include:

• cost comparisons between internal programs and those available commercially;
• benchmarking against other agencies;
• assessment of value for money based on participant and supervisor feedback. (p.85)

The potential benefits of VFM studies include the quick feedback they provide to decision makers and the public demonstration that the expenditure of funds is being evaluated using comparative data.

My study shows that value for money studies are straightforward to undertake compared to ROI and ROTI studies and they yield important data. This finding supports the ANAO (2002) which recommends the frequent use of VFM studies.

One of the key challenges for contemporary training organisations is to rid themselves of a demand-driven mentality and replace it with a supply-driven mindset. An outstanding example of a training organisation swapping the old mindset for the new, client-focused approach is provided by Drysdale Institute in Tasmania, an Institute specialising in tourism and hospitality training.

Drysdale is the focus of my latest column in the Campus Review, due for publication on 20 October. The story told in the column is of the tourism industry delivering a report to the training providers of Tasmania earlier this year, informing them that training was inadequate.

Among the key findings and recommendations were that:

• The shortage of trained chefs is pressing in regional areas and was being exacerbated by a leakage out of the industry of experienced cooks;
• There is a need for managers with business, leadership and human resource skills;
• Food and beverage attendants with sufficient skills levels and genuine career orientation are in short supply;
• Staff with gaming license and TAB and Keno skills are in short supply;
• There is strong demand for tour guides with interpretative skills in the eco-tourism sector;
• Across-the-board lack of staff with customer service skills and a service culture despite having required practical skills and formal qualifications;
• Concerns that any trained staff are not being made aware of the demands of the industry by training providers, leading to high attrition rates when they face the reality of the workplace;
• The industry may have to focus on training older workers to meet demand as school leavers, students and traditional part-time workers are attracted to other industries.
• Training in some areas such as cooking needs to be more “hands on”;
• Facilitate access of regional operators to training through regional learning centres

The above list is a very clear example of the demand-side view of life. The industry gave Drysdale six months to respond to its recommendations. Drysdale met all the recommendations in just under six months, and last week signed a MOU with the industry association, the Tourism Council of Tasmania.

The focus of my column is on the change management strategies used by Drysdale to change its structure and culture, in response to industry demand. The story shows that change management skills are vital to the sustainability of training organisations.

I am currently drafting a story to appear in the Campus Review later in October 2004 around the fear of many training providers: the fear that they will be wiped out if private e-learning companies gain a foothold in the local market. This fear is mostly directed at international companies. Training providers commonly respond to this fear by refusing to collaborate with e-learning companies.

My research shows that this fear is unfounded for a number of reasons:

• First, students normally trust local training providers, so are much more likely to use packaged e-learning programs when they are offered via the local provider than over the Internet, direct from the manufacturer.
• Second, students like to associate with the local provider: they like the human connections; they like some face to face contact.  Most students are disinclined to develop an association with a purely online e-learning provider.
• Third, e-learning companies understand that local training providers have something which they may never have: a loyal, accessible customer base. So e-learning companies need partnerships with local training providers.

The story I am composing uses the above points as a backdrop to the theme that training providers need to develop skills in brokering with e-learning companies, to extract the best possible arrangements for their students. The brokering needs to include attention to educational, business and technology issues. I have developed a decision-making tool that incorporates all of these issues and enables the training provider to quickly move into brokering.

I have just drafted my column for Campus Review, for publication next week, 13 October 2004. The column focuses on the challenge of how to embed an innovation in a training organisation. To illustrate the many different strategies that are possible when supporting an innovation, I focus on WA’s Challenger TAFE, which is currently embedding sustainability principles in the delivery of Training Packages.

The definition of sustainability guiding the Challenger TAFE initiative is provided by the Western Australian Government, which defines sustainability as meeting the needs of current and future generations through an integration of environmental protection, social advancement and economic prosperity.

When Principal Lecturer Christine Cooper commenced work on the sustainability issue within Challenger TAFE, she noted that staff were not fully conscious of the issues involved:

From my observations and discussions with teaching staff within the Institute, it appears that many teachers already embed sustainability principles into their Training Package delivery.  It seems to be intuitive and ‘common sense’, but there is no record of what they do, when, or how they do it.

So she set about recording their practice and helping them become more aware of what they do.

The column cites a range of different strategies used to support the innovation. This snapshot of Challenger TAFE demonstrates a range of factors that need to be attended to, if an innovation is to be successfully implemented and maintained:

• Factors driving the innovation that are external to Challenger TAFE include industry support; state government policies; the ANTA National Strategy 2004-2010; targeted research commissioned by NCVER and various state governments; and national networking and collaboration enabled by funding from Reframing the Future.
• Internal factors supporting the innovation include executive-level support within the RTO; skilled facilitation; and a supportive culture for developing improved teaching practice.

As I reported in the ANTA-funded report in 2003, Emerging Futures, Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET, ultimately an innovation in teaching and learning requires student support and the VET managers and teachers/trainers need to exercise judgment, knowledge and sensitivity. The Challenger case study effectively encompasses all of these many success factors, and clearly demonstrates the high-level skills needed to embed an innovation.

As is evident from some of my earlier postings to this blog, I am convinced about the value of permission-based e-marketing in education.  

I want to share some insights about email marketing from a recent workshop I chaired. I facilitate a group of Principals and senior managers from the NSW Adult and Community Education (ACE) sector – the ACE Entrepreneurs’ Group. A guest speaker at the September 2004 meeting, a specialist in e-marketing, noted that email marketing has the fastest response time and is the lowest cost per unit. Some interesting statistics she tabled included the following: 10.8m of Australia’s 20.8m population are online; 99% of those use email; and 80% have two or more email addresses.

The speaker introduced the following concepts, which might be new to many educators:

• ‘Customer Acquisition’, which is possible through the College’s website, or from feedback forms, or from enrolment forms
• ‘Customer Re-marketing’, where Colleges send out email alerts about the course catalogue is available
• ‘Customer Service Marketing’, where Colleges market through emails the availability of new products or services, such as online payment. 

The speaker also suggested that ACE providers consider the merits of renting email databases (where individuals have given permission), that are available for different postcode areas, e.g. for specific regional areas. Databases can be rented from brokers for set periods of time.

At the same September meeting, two members provided detailed reports on their email marketing activities. Both were already renting email databases and were pleased with the success of their recent email marketing strategies. Here are some excerpts from their stories:

• The first member, from a regional college, provided a detailed report on the development of seven different email campaigns, one for each of seven locations serviced by the college. This college is building a database of different market segments. The use of email marketing has enabled the regional college to reduce its printed brochures from $120,000 pa to $60,000 pa.
• The second college, in metropolitan Sydney, through using its website and email marketing and SMS marketing, has reduced its annual expenditure on printed brochures from $175,000 to around $105,000/$110,000pa.

Email marketing, in concert with website marketing, SMS marketing, printed brochures and other forms of marketing, is now a legitimate and strong contributor to educational marketing.

I am preparing a presentation to be delivered next week on systemic strategies to stimulate innovation in VET.

To stimulate innovation in provider organisations, the actions that can be undertaken by a systemic body such as a State or Territory Training Authority (STA) are many and varied, from top-down funding or policy initiatives to making funding available at the grass roots so that innovation emerges organically. To stimulate innovation, an STA can perform many roles, including adviser, broker, advocate, promoter, services provider, researcher and funding body.

Some of my research findings about possible systemic strategies for stimulating and supporting innovation include the following:

• provide teachers with generic advice about where to access existing information sources on innovation in teaching and learning
• provide brokerage or mediation services, putting teachers in touch with other like-minded professionals
• provide customised advice and specific services, catering for the particular interests, setting and context of individual VET professionals or organisations
• conduct research and development on innovative teaching at all levels of VET
• provide incentives to promote higher levels of ‘innovativeness’ in all teachers
• generate support to build the ‘innovation capacity’ of all VET communities (in Mitchell et al, 2003, 'Proposal for a national mechanism for promoting and sustaining innovation in teaching and learning in VET', ANTA, Melb).

The one thing an STA cannot do is control all the variables.

My ongoing research into innovation in VET teaching and learning shows that VET teachers and trainers need to quickly move beyond conventional roles of designer, developer, deliverer and demonstrator, to becoming knowledge systems experts, learning brokers, learning strategists and facilitators of learning.

My research to date also shows that:

• There are considerable social, economic, political and technological drivers for innovation in teaching and learning in VET.
• Continuous innovation is needed in teaching and learning in VET, to meet the expanding demands of customers, clients and communities of interest who are all shifting their requirements towards much more customised and relevant training and training experiences.
• Students need innovation in their learning to better engage them as self-directed individuals and to encourage them to acquire the skills to meet the pace of change in industry and thrive amidst the changes in the world of work.
• Innovation is needed in teaching and learning in VET to cater for the trend towards lifelong learning, with the emphasis on self-directed, portable, timely, flexible and collaborative learning.

VET teachers and trainers need the capabilities to match the above. An important element is giving them better access to knowledge about the kind of professional teaching and learning practices that can help them fulfil their future roles. Continuous staff development, networking and other collaborative activities will help VET teachers and trainers meet these future roles.

Last week I had a long talk to a friend about my blog. I discussed how I was still undecided about which way to take it (e.g. move away from the research base; become more informal; make it more discursive) and how I was still experimenting and didn’t know for sure where it would take me. Overnight, he generously sent me the following note. The note coincides with my current thinking – that my blog will probably evolve and change over time...ending up mainly as a way of exploring ideas. 

"You might have seen this already, from George Siemens (http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/) best of the commentators, I think (given that life is too short to keep up with Steven Downes). Blogger Burnout: (at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64088,00.html) comments: ‘Blogging for some is an obvious labor of love, and having a forum that belongs to them and enables them to write whatever they want, and have it seen by throngs of readers, is a very attractive proposition. This is especially true because blogging is a timeless endeavor and one that allows authors to vent about whatever's on their minds.’

'Comment (from George Siemens): This article highlights the rigorous blogging schedule of popular blogs. For myself, I find my use for blogging has evolved over the four years. It started out as a thrill to be able tool publish personal thoughts and have people read and respond. Then it became a forum to synthesize trends in varying fields. Then it became a forum for personal knowledge management. Currently, it is less a broadcast tool (though I do send out weekly blog summaries to a mailing list of several thousand), and more of a personal space. Periodically, my posts will result in discussion via email (due to comment spam, I usually have the comment feature turned off)...at other times, other ed-tech bloggers will share comments and reactions in their forums. What started off as an end in itself, has now become a comfortable, fairly regular, habit of idea exploration and expression.' ”

Last Tuesday, 21 September 2004, I co-facilitated a one-day workshop for educators networking with industry. Participants at the workshop were reporting on their networking projects, at the mid-way point in a six month period.

I commonly facilitate these types of workshops, but this particular workshop stands out as exceptional, in terms of the quality and depth of conceptual insights tabled on the day. The written evaluations at the end of the day confirmed that the participants also found it exceptional.

On reflection, I believe that the reasons why this workshop was a stand-out are many, some of which included the following:

• the numbers were modest, with around 20 people seated at four round tables, creating an intimate environment
• the participants came well prepared to make a seven minute presentation on their networks, covering three specific topics (agreed goals; achievements; next steps)
• one of the participants, attending as an observer, has undertaken postgraduate courses in fine aspects of networking (e.g. he is an expert on Actor Network Theory), and he had agreed to my request that I would use him as a resource during the day
• three other participants who were there as observers had extensive systemic knowledge of their State training jurisdictions in terms of networks.

The day started well, with the first participant to give his seven minute address deciding to construct his presentation around the information I had set out earlier on two whiteboards. On one whiteboard I had drawn two interlocking circles, with one labeled ‘Providers’ and the other labeled ‘Industry’. On the other whiteboard I had listed five findings from earlier research I had conducted on industry training networks, viz:

• The need for industry training networks is increasing, as VET organizations become more aware of their dependency on relationships
• Open or loosely structured networks suit the diverse and dispersed membership of many industry training networks
• Building industry training networks is made challenging by factors such as inexperience in networking and limited resources of small business to participate
• Efficient information sharing processes help industry training networks function effectively
• Networks can be sustained by continually responding to members’ changing goals and to changing external conditions.

The first participant to make a presentation described his network in terms of the diagram of interlocking circles and analysed his network in terms of the above five features of networks. We then decided to use the diagram of interlocking circles as the focal point for each of the subsequent twelve presentations.

The simple diagram of interlocking circles encouraged much theorizing during the workshop, such as:

• The concept of space and how networks create new spaces for relationships and interactions
• The concept of boundaries and how networks often stretch or explore new boundaries
• The concept of the skilled intermediary, operating between the two worlds of providers and industry
• The concept that we live and work within networks and that, for most of us, these networks are more important than organisations.

The workshop generated multiple insights about the nature of networks and the complex activity of networking, providing the participants with new ways of understanding their current practice. Networking emerges from this workshop as an essential activity and vital skill area for contemporary educators.

Today I am constructing a knowledge management (KM) survey for distribution to staff within an educational organisation.

The survey questions are customised to accommodate the following factors:

• this is a newly created organisation within a long-standing educational institution
• the organisation is a resource for the wider institution, so the creation and storage and dissemination of knowledge is core business
• the organisation undertaking the survey is about to commence a structured project to develop a knowledge management strategy
• the organisation has an imperative to develop a KM strategy – it is meant to be a leader in this field within the larger institution.

In preparing the survey, I believe that the questions will serve a range of purposes:

• the questions will provoke responses which I will collate and feed back to the whole group, to provide them with a summary profile of current attitudes and practices about KM
• the questions will also assist individuals to realise that their work is predominantly knowledge work and that they are actively involved in knowledge management, without using the term
• the questions will encourage respondents to not only reflect more about themselves and their organization in terms of knowledge management, but will also enable each respondent to construct their own map about KM, to guide their future KM activities.
  

IP and copyright issues are becoming increasingly important, with so many learning materials being developed in digital format - say as e-learning programs. When developing or modifying digital resources, it is also easy to forget about the ownership of intellectual property.

I recently drafted a column for Campus Review on the issues around copyright and intellectual property (IP), based on the experiences of AEShareNet. The story will probably appear in the issue published on 13 October 2004.

According to Dennis Macnamara, Business Development Manager of AEShareNet, if VET practitioners are to really leverage their IP both within their organisation and to share and trade IP across institutions, they must come to grips with IP management.

However, Macnamara finds that IP “gets less attention and respect than the management of the furniture”.  For successful VET organisations of the future, good IP management will be a key success indicator.

AEShareNet’s first annual conference will be dedicated to the topic of Unlocking IP. The conference will be conducted over two days in Sydney in November this year and is being organised in collaboration with the Baker McKenzie Cyber Law and Policy Centre of UNSW.

For more information about the forthcoming conference on Unlocking IP, see http://www.bakercyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/

I have just finished my latest column for Campus Review, to appear in the issue due out on 6 October 2004. The column discusses how e-learning is progressively being tied to the electronic support and measurement of business improvement from learning at work. This growing integration of learning and work using web-based technologies is called e-performance.

Theorist Mariano Bernardez defines e-performance as “the capacity of an organisation, teams and individuals to generate measurable performance improvement through the integrated use of online practices and technologies”.

The column focuses on the views and work of  Clint Smith from TAFE frontiers in Victoria. Smith’s 2004 project as a Flexible Learning Leader for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework is to explore the issue of e-performance.

According to Smith, two of the tools driving e-performance are integrated learning management systems and e-portfolios. Over the horizon, Smith sees e-performance organisations using a wide range of electronic tools to assist staff learning, while improving corporate performance.

The column begins to address the question as to whether VET organisations will also become e-performance organisations. 
 
Contact Clint Smith at csmith@tafefrontiers.com.au

Today, Thursday 16 September, I met with a client to commence planning the development of a knowledge management (KM) strategy for a multi-sector educational organisation.

Planning to develop a KM strategy requires considerable care, as I find that knowledge management polarizes people. It is one of those terms that can induce disparaging comments, set heads spinning and cause heart palpitations. For some people, KM represents all that is woolly, trendy and imprecise. For others, KM symbolises innovation, contemporary work practices and valuing of all staff as knowledge workers.

To develop a KM strategy, my preference as a consultant and facilitator is to take – as will happen with this current project – sufficient time, that is, around two-three months, to guide staff through a learning experience. As with all quality learning experiences, there will be adequate opportunities during the project for staff with a range of different learning styles to engage with the project, to learn at a pace that suits them, and to find ways to enter the discourse that will be generated.

This learning approach is essential if the KM strategy is to become embedded in ongoing business processes within the organization. A goal of this KM project is to enable all staff participants to identify ways they can contribute in future to a continuously improved KM strategy.

I find that this learning approach to the development of a KM strategy also creates an appropriate environment for staff to share their implicit as well as their explicit knowledge – one of the highest goals of a KM project. We will use a number of techniques in this project to ensure that informal learning occurs and that implicit knowledge is identified and acknowledged. We will ensure that KM only produces positive heart palpitations.

Yesterday, Tuesday 14 September 2004, I spent the day co-facilitating a group of ten change agents from training provider organisations around the country.

Change agency is a very complex undertaking, requiring the individual to have a clear understanding of his or her values, motivations, views of other people and expectations about how much change is possible over any period of time. The change agents I worked with yesterday were impressive in understanding their values, motivations, perceptions and expectations. This provides them with a stable foundation to undertake change agency.

Possibly the main learning that has occurred within this group of change agents is the acceptance that change is very hard to achieve. Change agents often need to temper their initial enthusiasm, modify their hopes and accept that many people resist change – for multiple reasons. Change agents need to put aside the pop psychology books on change agency which suggest that anyone can learn the tricks of change management and that if the change agent stays positive anything is possible. Life is more complex than that, particularly life in large organisations. The new documentary on at movie theatres, The Corporation, is a chilling reminder of the potential 'insanity' of many organisations.

Coupled with the acceptance that change is difficulty to achieve, the change agents I am mentoring have come to value the small wins, the little victories, the occasional conversions of previous sceptics and the incremental steps that will eventually add up to a substantial change.

But the main thing that these change agents have come to value is that they have attributes and strengths inside themselves that are more important to draw on as a change agent than the recipes or formulas for change agency that are available in text books. While it is very important to know about different theories of change – particularly so that the change agent can critique the shallow or unrealistic theories – it is more important that change agents know much about themselves, including:

• their capabilities
• their current limitations
• their preconceptions about people
• their attitudes to organisational change
• their biases and hopes
• their fears and suspicions
• their rich previous experiences
• their accumulated breadth of knowledge
• their abilities to work with other people
• and their confidence about who can provide them with ongoing support and encouragement.

On Monday this week, 13 September 2004, I co-facilitated a workshop for managers of twenty two training organisations from around Australia. The workshop focused on two areas: strategic management and change management.

A key reflection on the workshop is that the level of sophistication is rising in training providers in Australia, in relation to the use of strategic management and change management.

Regarding strategic management, a clear sign of this sophistication is the care taken by providers to collect and analyse data in order to identify the key factors in the internal and external environments. In many cases, the groups involved in the strategic management activities have taken 2-3 months to undertake this strategic analysis.

This is a significant change in approach, in that the tendency in the past was for groups to rush forward to determine strategic directions and options.

Similarly, with the groups undertaking change management, the tendency in the past was for groups to implement solutions before the problems had been fully diagnosed. A sign of such an approach in the past was the mechanistic following of a formula from one of the change gurus – the eight steps or the five steps or the nine steps to success – without sufficient analysis of the change issues. Note that most of the change gurus are from the USA and their models are proven for US corporate sector, but not for the complex environments of Australian training providers.

It takes considerable patience to carefully diagnose the change or changes required, as the temptation is to excite people about the benefits of a wonderful future. But experience shows that any effort applied to diagnosis will pay dividends. Following the diagnosis, a range of interventions can be considered and the most appropriate ones implemented.

A sophisticated strategic manager of a training provider has skills in collecting and analyzing data, clarifying strategic directions and making strategic choices, before considering or implementing new approaches.

A sophisticated change manager of a training provider has skills in diagnosing problems, identifying possible interventions and resisting the temptation to find a breakthrough solution.

Sandra Lawrence, from TAFE Queensland, whom I am currently mentoring in a leadership program, has given me the OK to share this list of humorous blogisms she developed:

“Given the increasing popularity of blogs, is it time we invented a new blog lexicon? I'd propose leaving the serious terminology to the experts, and go for a populist approach. Some suggestions:

• blogic - blog logic
• blodger - a frequent blog visitor, almost lives there
• blogade - blog protectionism
• blogbuster - a popular, often visited blog
• blog curdling - scary blog
• blogin & blogout - entering and leaving the blog
• blogarithm - the power of a blog over its base
• blogger heads - differing views published on the blog
• blogjam - download troubles
• catablog - blog contents
• diablog - blog conversations
• chronoblogical - postings over time
• watchblog - a bullblog for hackers
• in the bloghouse - where the blogdog lives
• blogma - blog philosophy, or blog owner's mum
• topdog and underblog - more and less impressive blogs
• leapblog - jumping from one blog area to another
• ground blog day - blog déjà vu

And yes I know I should get back to work and stop this blogeril - inconsequential blog drivel!”

This morning, Thursday 9 September 2004, I attended a breakfast conducted by one of the world's major e-learning companies, SkillSoft, at the Marriott Hotel near Circular Quay. I usually avoid such events, as they are usually an excuse for the vendor to thrust endless products at a captured and bored audience inching its way through microwaved-warmed bacons and egg.

The main reason I attended this event was because of the pre-publicity that SkillSoft had mapped a range of its existing e-learning products against the competencies for one of the most popular qualifications in the Australian Qualifications Framework – the Certificate IV in Business. The promise turned out to be true: a Queensland RTO had undertaken the mapping and identified a number of supplementary activities that needed to be undertaken to ensure competencies are developed.

Similar mapping has been undertaken by Electric Paper to match its e-learning courseware with the Certificate 1 in IT, but the Certificate IV in Business is a much bigger market in Australia. (By the way, I think the Electric Paper e-learning content could be mapped against higher level competencies).

Interestingly, SkillSoft has also mapped its e-learning courses against modules required for the Certificate IV in Frontline Management. Smart move, as Frontline Management is another popular qualification.

This acceptance of reality by SkillSoft – that  Australian VET competencies are not going to be changed to suit existing e-learning courses – is a breakthrough. I predict that this will be a winning move by SkillSoft and will encourage it and other e-learning vendors to do more of this mapping. Nothing like meeting the market!

Now we need e-learning vendors to map existing e-learning programs against other highly popular VET qualifications, such as the soon to be endorsed TAA package. This will also cause consternation for local developers of similar e-learning products, who might have hoped the big e-learning players would stay clear of the VET market.

One of the aspects of the VET sector which makes it interesting is that the VET landscape keeps changing. For decades the landscape was dominated by ANTA, TAFE, TDA, unions and State and Territory Training Authorities. Now the landscape is much more varied, with the emergence of ACPET, ACE providers of VET and literally about four thousand private providers.

I have just drafted an article for my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, which will appear in a few weeks, on the emergence of a new but potentially powerful player in VET.

The Enterprise Registered Training Organisation (RTO) Forum is planning to be a new force in the VET arena, to better represent the needs of its constituencies. An Enterprise RTO is a company, business or corporation which is also an RTO.

Eight enterprise RTOs are founding members of this new Forum, which was initiated in 2003 in the belief that the learning needs of staff within their enterprises could be better supported if the enterprises developed a united public voice. Seed funding for the network was provided by ANTA’s Reframing the Future program. The eight Forum members are the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Centrelink Virtual College, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Insurance Australia Group, SingTel Optus Pty Ltd, Woolworths Limited, Westpac Banking Corporation and QANTAS.

One of the critically important perspectives this group can bring to VET is how can learning best be supported within enterprises. This new perspective will be high value.

Last Thursday, 2 September 2004, I heard a stimulating presentation on e-marketing delivered by digital strategist for a group I facilitate, the ACE NSW Entrepreneurs’ Group. The speaker is an Australian leader as well as a university lecturer, award judge and writer in this field of email marketing. The ACE NSW Entrepreneurs’ Group consists of Principals and senior managers of ACE NSW Community Colleges and the Group has the charter to drive e-business and e-learning through the ACE NSW sector.

This is the third speaker this year I have invited to address the Entrepreneurs' Group about email marketing, because I have a view that this is one of the breakthrough strategies for educational bodies wanting to better market their services. Provided the individuals receiving the email have given their permission, email marketing is entirely ethical and the emails can be personalised to suit the individual receiving them, optimising their impact.

In her presentation, the speaker summarised the main uses of email marketing:

• eNewsletters
• Promotional emails
• Product updates emails
• Survey invitation emails
• Customer service emails
• Announcement emails
• Staff news emails
• Shareholder news emails.

Some of the opening points made in the presentation were as follows:

• Email marketing has improved from the early days of the Internet, such that now it can lead to measurable revenue increases
• Research shows that email marketing provide better returns on investment that any other direct marketing method
• The benefits of email marketing include the ability to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time
• It is possible to measure the following aspects of email marketing: who opened it; what they clicked on; whether they forwarded it; and whether it produced a transaction.

The speaker also shared some findings about Australian consumers of email marketing:

• We are very sophisticated in the way we use email.
• We have developed a range of strategies for managing our inboxes.
• We are quick to pick up on email content that interests us or to drop it if it fails
• We regard unsolicited emails as untrustworthy and an irrelevant menace.

The presentation then explored in depth the three key issues of customer acquisition,  customer re-marketing and customer service, before focusing on expected results from the email marketing – all new terms for most educators.

Email marketing will come to education like a huge wave. The question is, who will surf it: conventional or forward-thinking educational managers?

I predict that progressive educational managers of the future will be most interested in how to write a concise and arresting 300 word email message to prospective students. Or how to compose an engaging few words to appear in the 'Subject' line of an email to existing students, in pursuit of repeat business.

On Wednesday last week, 1 September 2004, I enjoyed a long conversation with an outstanding VET practitioner who is a participant in a structured program I am currently mentoring. The practitioner is Margaret Dix, Manager Staff Learning and Development, Northern Sydney Institute.

Margaret set out for me the concept of a ‘conversation space’ that she has implemented in her very large TAFE Institute: ‘A conversation space is an opportunity for a professional conversation, for people with a passion for teaching and learning’. The features of the practice are as follows:

• In her Institute, a conversation space is created by offering colleagues the chance to discuss for an hour or so a topical issue in teaching and learning – while staff have their coffee and sandwiches.
• These conversation spaces are convened by the members of her Staff Learning and Development Unit and are attended by small groups of around 5-10 staff.
• The participants in the conversation space are normally challenged by a controversial quotation which sparks off conversation.

The initial motivation for the creation of the conversation spaces was that ‘teaching and learning often seem to be forgotten'. So she has asked her staff to spread the practice throughout the Institute, encouraging teachers to ‘talk about being a TAFE teacher’. Interestingly, many of the practitioners disclose that ‘this is the first time they have had the chance to think and talk about what they do as teachers'.

One of her initial findings from the conversation spaces is that the contemporary TAFE teacher needs to have an ‘eclectic range of skills and knowledge’ beyond skills of instruction and knowledge of an industry. For instance, she finds that ‘teachers need to be able to offer advice to students on a range of issues including career opportunities’. She also finds that the recent reports on VET pedagogy provide a useful framework for  understanding the breadth of skills and knowledge identified in the conversation spaces.

The discussion with this outstanding VET professional reminded me of the concept of a ‘professional learning system’ proposed by Hoban (2002) which I referred to in my unpublished report to ANTA in 2003 on a national – but locally implemented – mechanism for innovation in teaching and learning in VET. Hoban (2002, pp.68-69) suggests that a theoretical framework for a professional learning system should be based on the conditions required for teacher learning, discussed below:

• A conception of teaching as an art or profession, indicating a dynamic relationship between students, other teachers, school, classroom, curriculum and context. Because of these interactions, there is always uncertainty and ambiguity in changing teaching practice.
• Reflection is important - as teachers need to become aware of why they teach the way they do and to focus on understanding the patterns of change resulting from the dynamic relationships in which they are involved.
• Teachers need a purpose for learning to foster a desire for change and so content should be negotiated.
• The time frame is long term, as changing teaching means adjusting the balance among many aspects of the existing classroom system.
• A sense of community is necessary - so that teachers trust each other to share experiences such that topics for inquiry and debate may extend over several months or longer. As a result of this progressive discourse, teachers theorize and discussions are generative so that new ideas are always evolving.
• Teachers need to experiment with their ideas in action to test what works or does not work in their classrooms.
• A variety of knowledge sources are needed as conceptual inputs to extend the experiences of the participants.
• Student feedback is needed - in response to the ideas being tried out in the classroom.

The use of ‘conversation spaces’ for professional dialogue fits will with Hoban’s framework for a professional learning system. Sometimes there are good practices in Australian VET that are world class, such as this use of conversation spaces, but receive little recognition.

A forthcoming story in my weekly column in Campus Review concerns the Australian VET trend towards the creation of what I call TAFE mega-Institutes. These Institutes have around 700-1000 staff, annual budgets of $70m or so, and population bases of around 500,000.

This formula has been applied in NSW, TAS and now SA. There are some mega-Institutes in WA and VIC, but the mega-Institute formula has not been strictly enforced in these two States. CIT in Canberra was probably the first of this type.

In my column I address a fear that these mega-Institutes will become super-sized: fat, unwell and slow-moving. Fortunately I am able to analyse one of these mega-Institutes which is two years old and is working very hard to be sleek and agile.

What is a key to avoid becoming super-sized? One key I discuss in the article is extensive and ongoing change management. But underpinning the change management is informed and enlightened leadership; a commitment to customer-responsiveness; and collaboration between the different segments of the organisation. Staying fit and remaining responsive to customers when you have a large infrastructure ain't simple.

The BRW magazine reported - in an article called ‘The Big 6’ in its issue of 19-25 August 2004  - on a survey which revealed the six management objectives which are most important for business leaders in Australia. What struck me about the list is the focus on much more than fiscal management. The six key management objectives of leading CEOs are:

• Recruit good people
• Customer passion
• Manage your assets
• Innovate or die
• Create value
• Leadership.

In the article, each of the six management objectives is discussed by a different Australian academic – all leaders in business schools.

Except for the objective to manage your assets, the six objectives do not put a strong emphasis on fiscal management. In fact, Paul Kerin, Professor of Business Strategy at Melbourne Business School, notes the following:

Some of the best chief executives I have seen could barely read a profit-and-loss statement, let alone comprehend a net present value. But they possessed superb intuition and judgement.

Kerin suggests the leading chief executives focus on ‘creating value rather than accounting numbers’.

This view is supported by the CEO rated number one in the survey: Westfarmers' Michael Chaney. He believes that leaders need to think beyond financial boundaries:

There are issues such as leadership, being decisive, constancy and ethics that deserve to be put on an equal rating.

This suggests that, while it would be irresponsible for VET/RTO CEOs to ignore fiscal management and managing assets and creating value, there are other important objectives for VET/RTO CEOs to meet, if they are to mirror effective CEOs in the corporate sector. These other priorities include recruiting good people, being innovative, providing leadership and having a passion for customers.

Today I met with a group of VET professionals to plan a knowledge management project. At the meeting I stressed that cultural issues precede technology solutions when designing knowledge management activities.

Research (e.g. McDermott, 2000; Cohen & Prusak, 2001) shows that knowledge management, while taking advantage of technology such as databases, is dependent on cultural issues within an organisation, such as the creative use of knowledge by practitioners within the organisation. For instance, McDermott (2000) argues that ‘the art of professional practice is to turn information into solutions’ (p.24). He shows that professionals face a stream of problems:

…when to run a product promotion, how to estimate the size of an oil field, how to reduce the weight and cost of a structure. To solve these problems, professionals piece information together, reflect on their experience, generate insights, and use those insights to solve problems (p.24).

McDermott (2000) concludes that thinking is at the heart of professional practice and knowledge is the residue of thinking: knowledge comes from experience. (pp.24-25) VET practitioners can be reconceptualised as professionals who piece information together, reflect on their experience, generate insights, and use those insights to solve problems.

Information technology can assist such knowledge management by providing cues for identifying what information to capture, constructing taxonomies for organising information, and determining access (McDermott, 2000, p.22), but the human processes that occur within an organisation, such as enquiring, discussing, reflecting and sharing, are more critical to the growth of knowledge. 

This finding about the fundamental human aspects of knowledge management is significant for VET. The research suggests that the key to knowledge development and application within organisations is to support professionals and their communities. Technology is simply one of the enabling mechanisms available. McDermott (2000) suggests that primary attention not be given to technology but that managers do the following:

Identify the community that cares about a topic and then enhance their ability to think together, stay in touch with each other, share ideas with each other, and connect with other communities (p.28).

Interestingly, McDermott (2000) cautions about the limitations of relying on documentation and electronic linkages for leveraging knowledge in an organisation:

It is not surprising that documenting procedures, linking people electronically, or creating websites is often not enough to get people to think together, share insights they didn’t know they had, or generate new knowledge (p.28).

These ideas are extended in Knowledge Management and the National Training Framework: Core Ideas available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on Publications and then on General Publications).

Today I made a presentation to the Strategic Planning Workshop of the NSW Board of Adult and Community Education on the topic of 'Key Strategic Issues in e-business and e-learning within the contemporary ACE context'.

In addressing this topic, I posed six questions, one of which was: 'Can e-business and e-learning enable ACE to create and sustain competitive advantage?'

I explained that sustainable competitive advantages are normally derived from the organisation’s exceptional skills or assets or resources, for example its brand name or customer base. ACE organisations can develop sustainable competitive advantages through flexible learning by doing it well (that is, developing and using skills in flexible learning) and developing a strong reputation with a particular customer group (an asset).

Aaker (1995) argues that an effective sustainable competitive advantage will be created when a strategy has at least the following characteristics:

• It should be supported by assets and skills
• It should be employed in a competitive arena containing segments that will value the strategy
• It should be employed against competitors who cannot easily match or neutralize the sustainable competitive advantage
• It should be substantial enough to make a difference
• It must be sustainable in the face of environmental changes and competitor actions
• It should be linked with the positioning of the overall business.

I then discussed how some of the different types of sustainable competitive advantages possible through the use of flexible learning include:

• Reputation for client responsiveness in flexible learning
• Clear focus on a segment of the market in flexible learning
• Retention of skilled staff in flexible learning
• Reputation for innovation in flexible learning
• High profile and name recognition in flexible learning
• Pioneer in the field of flexible learning
• Breadth of products in flexible learning
• Long-standing base of customers in flexible learning
• Reputation for quality in flexible learning
• Technical superiority in flexible learning
• Differentiating characteristics of flexible learning products
• Knowledge of the business of flexible learning
• Effective partnership arrangements in flexible learning  (Mitchell, Latchem, Bates and Smith, 2001, Critical issues in flexible learning for VET managers, TAFE frontiers, Melbourne).

On Wednesday this week, 18 August 2004, I conducted a workshop for managers at Brisbane North Institute of TAFE on the topic of 'The qualities, skills and knowledge needed by a VET change leader - based on research'.

Research by others and my own research tells us much about qualities of a change leader in VET. For example, Scott (1999) argues that if change agents are to apply the knowledge they have, they need some additional personal attributes:

• their stance towards change, work and the people who populate it;
• their ability to think creatively, reflectively and with focus, especially their ability to ‘read and match’
• their ability to continuously update what they know and can do, especially through their expertise in the self-management of their career-long learning (p.148).

Hayes (2002) considers that it might be possible for change agents to learn the theoretical skills of change agency, but they also need faith in their own abilities:

Some managers may have the conceptual knowledge and required skills to equip them to intervene and make a difference, but they may fail to act because they have insufficient faith in their own ability to affect outcomes (p.20).

Confidence is essential for change managers:

If they do not have any confidence in their own ability to manage the change and achieve any improvements they will not try to exercise influence (Hayes 2002, p.21).

My own research (Mitchell 2004) shows that change agents need a high level of judgment, courage and sensitivity – to effectively assist the change process. Change agents also need to be reflective and insightful while coping with resistance, apathy, exuberance or turmoil.

Finally, Buchanan & Badham (2000) believe that, to continue to grow, the change agent needs to be a reflective practitioner:

The reflective practitioner is also self-conscious, self-aware and self-critical, learning from experience – and from mistakes when necessary (p.207).

It is interesting that researchers consistently nominate the qualities of being reflective, flexible, confident, conscious, aware and self-critical.

I have prepared a paper for my session at the AUSTAFE National Conference in Queensland from 18-20 August 2004. The paper is entitled ‘Alternative approaches to change agency and change management in VET’.

In the paper I argue that there is no one best way to approach either change agency or change management.

In relation to change agency, I argue that:

• there are alternative ways to diagnose aspects of the organisation that need changing
• there are alternative ways to self-diagnose
• there are alternative process models of change – the how of change management – from Kotter to Cummings and Worley
• while there are some similar skills and knowledge needed by change agents, the mix or emphasis changes from one context to the next
• there are advantages and disadvantages of internal versus external change agents.

In relation to change management, I argue that:

• one prominent school of change management is the emergent change school, represented by Kotter (the guiding coalition)
• another prominent school is that of planned change, represented by Kurt Lewin (unfreeze, move to new level, freeze) and Cummings and Worley (5 deliberate, logical steps: create readiness; create a vision; develop political support; manage the transition; sustain momentum)
• a third school advocates a combination of the emergent and planned approach, represented by Stace and Dunphy
• each of these three schools has its detractors and supporters.

I conclude that:

• to perform effectively in different settings, change agents and change strategists need to be aware of alternative approaches to managing change
• change management initiatives in VET, including change agency, need to be grounded in the theory of change management
• consciousness empowers change managers.

For a copy of the paper, please email me on johnm@jma.com.au

I discussed in a previous posting that gaining legitimacy is a challenge for internal change agents – that is, staff operating within their own organisations as change agents. In this posting I discuss another major challenge for internal change agents – remaining objective.

Paton and McCalman (2000, p.189), drawing on Margulies and Raia (1978), identify this second potential limitation of the internal change agent, the challenge of remaining objective – that is, remaining objective in relation to a problem existing within the change agent’s own organisation. Factors that might hinder the change agent’s objectivity include:

• being too close to what the problem is
• being part of the problem
• being willing to confront issues when promotion and pay issues are forthcoming
• being part of the power system being examined
• being aware of the needs and demands of superiors (p.189).

Interestingly, Paton and McCalman (2003) see as a solution to the problem of objectivity that the internal change agent ‘must not and cannot become involved in change within his/her area’. (p.189). The custom in VET is to do the opposite: to deliberately engage colleagues to work within their own areas as change agents.

The position taken by Paton and McCalman (2003) can be taken as a cautionary note that the use of internal change agents within their own areas of VET organisations is, at the least, challenging, requiring high-order skills.

I discuss these ideas further in chapter 5 of my report The Skilling of VET Change Agents, available from http://reframingthefuture.net (click on Publications, then click on Sub-program 2).

Forming networks is one of the buzz concepts in VET at the moment. But beyond the buzz, are networks always a positive phenomenon? We need to be honest about the positives and negatives of networks, but is VET capable of a dispassionate critique of networks? A problem in my beloved VET, in which I have worked for 30 years, is the sector’s historical tendency to be atheoretical, to shun analysis, to hope and pray that the big things in VET life (e.g. provider organizations, industry, teaching, learning) are simple. On the other hand, there are some aspects of VET culture that are attractive and ennobling, such as the genuine desire by the majority of VET practitioners to collaborate to improve services to students.

So I read with considerable interest a brutally frank article in yesterday’s The Australian (Wednesday 11 August 2004) about networks in the university sector, which illustrates some chilling aspects of university culture and the potential negatives of networks. If we think there are some downsides to VET culture, read on for some insights into university culture.

The article was written by John Gava, a senior lecturer in law at my original alma mater, the University of Adelaide. His article was entitled ‘Networks hinder the pursuit of truth’ and he asked some key questions: ‘But does networking threaten the basic goals of academic life? Should academics network?’ Some key points he made are as follows:

Networking threatens honesty in several ways. To establish a network one has to be willing to compromise one’s beliefs in order to attract friends and avoid scaring them away. This might involve being all things to all people, a wonderful skill in a politician or market player but hardly a sound academic attribute.

To establish and maintain a network one must compromise with and help the members of one’s network.

He points out the group pressure in networks to suppress one’s individuality:

In a more subtle way, networking operates as an internal censor, ensuring that one’s opinions and decisions will accord with the needs of the network.

Finally, Gava sees networks as contrary to the core identity of the pure academic:

A true intellectual has to be prepared to disagree with, indeed offend, the closest of colleagues. The objects of a network will always work against one’s intellectual conscience.

Besides alarming VET practitioners about the fiercely individual and competitive ethos of a university, Gava has bravely and correctly reminded us that networks do have limitations; they do require compromises; and they can threaten truth.

In the literature on networking, Cohen and Prusak (2001, p.70) note the potential limitations of networks, which can become like rigid clans – elitist, insular, idiosyncratic, corrupt or destructive. Networks can also develop ‘groupthink’ and ossify. Networks can breed unthinking loyalty and unquestioned shared beliefs. On the other hand, warm and fuzzy networks prevent people from asking tough questions.

There is some hope for networks in VET. Cohen and Prusak (2001, p.72) believe that the key to developing and sustaining networks is maintaining trust. VET practitioners often pride themselves on their capacity to trust, and this characteristic can militate against the negatives of networking described by Gava. But we need to be ever mindful of the limitations of networks. Gava's honesty is to be commended.

I am preparing a presentation to a State/Territory Training Authority on how the STA can assist innovation in its VET sector. Before it develops any strategies, I will be advising the STA to consider the following discussion of the definition of innovation, from my ANTA-funded 2003 report Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET (Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine).

There are numerous definitions of innovation in the literature. However, in the Emerging Futures project, a scan of the literature did not provide us with a satisfactory definition of innovation in teaching and learning for VET, so we adapted a working model based on Williams (1999) and West (in King & Anderson 2002).

Innovation is sometimes a renewal

Williams (1999) defines innovation as follows:  

the implementation of new and improved knowledge, ideas, methods, processes, tools, equipment and machinery, which leads to new and better products, services, and processes (p.17).

Williams (1999) points out that the word innovation is derived from the Latin innovatio (renewal or renovation), based on novus (new) as in novelty. Note that innovation is about the implementation of not just new ideas and knowledge, but also of improved ideas and knowledge. Hence, many of the case studies and vignettes in Emerging Futures are about the renewal or renovation or improvement of an existing educational service.

A sequence over time

Williams’ (1999) model shows that discovery and invention, as outcomes of creativity, lead to the process of innovation and the implementation of the innovation. Our study, Emerging Futures, attempts, where possible, to describe this sequence of activities in each of the fifteen case studies and vignettes.

Because of this sequence that starts with creativity, an innovation may take some time to be implemented. Many of the innovations described in Emerging Futures took some years to unfold. In adapting this model and in framing the report called Emerging Futures, the view was taken that innovation in teaching and learning needs to lead to improved outcomes. So the implementation of the innovation in the case studies and vignettes has included evidence of the reported benefits in each.

Types of innovation

Williams (1999) identifies different types of innovation: for example, product innovation; new and improved services; new and improved work operations, processes and methods; new and improved machine design, engineering and layout; new markets and marketing methods; synthesis; and replication. The case studies and vignettes in Emerging Futures are primarily of the following four types, or combinations of two or more of these types:

• new and improved services;
• new and improved work operations, processes and methods;
• synthesis – when existing ideas, products, services or processes are combined in some new way so that an improved idea, product, service or process results;
• replication – copying or duplicating or learning from others or applying someone else’s idea or invention in a new situation.

While developing a new service is more original and often more visible than improving an existing service or copying someone else’s, each type of innovation is of value.

Distinguishing features of innovation in action

The work of West and others (in King & Anderson 2002) provides further valuable assistance in the recognition of innovation and its distinction from organisational change in general. These authors characterise organisational innovation as follows:

• an innovation is a tangible product, process or procedure within an organisation;
• an innovation must be new to the social setting within which it is introduced, although not necessarily new to the individual(s) introducing it;
• an innovation must be intentional not accidental;
• an innovation must not be a routine change;
• an innovation must be aimed at producing a benefit;
• an innovation must be public in its effects (King & Anderson 2002, pp.2-3).

Taken together, the above thinking about innovation provided the Emerging Futures study with a basis for recognising innovation in VET and for making a selection of 15 case studies and vignettes.

The STA I am advising would do well to consider the above discussion and its ramifications for a sector. Managing innovation requires, first of all, clarification of the meaning and dimensions of the concept.

The topic of e-business still generates a lot of hype. I find that the most common response to the topic from some journalists is to recycle their tired old articles on the dotbombs. So it was a pleasure to read a sensible article from Graeme Philipson in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, 10 August 2004, called ‘E-business at middle age’.

Philipson focuses on the impact of the large vendors such as PeopleSoft and Oracle on the concepts and language within e-business. He also identifies the influence of the market research company Gartner. Philipson shows how concepts such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) were heavily promoted by Gartner, Oracle and others in the late 1990s and then in the current decade these same companies took to placing ‘e-‘ in front of terms like ERP and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). While these companies ‘grew fat on the fruits of the ERP boom’, these same companies may not have done enough to assist all types of organisations to clearly think through the complex issues raised by e-business.

While Philipson rightly criticizes these companies for manipulating the language of e-business, he has no difficulty acknowledging the substantial impact of e-business. For example, he says:

E-commerce – the use of the Internet to conduct transactions – is now a fact of life, and industries as diverse as travel, banking and music have been transformed. In the process, enterprise applications have entered yet another phase, where applications are even more tightly integrated, but which has no commonly agreed name.

Looking beyond the efforts of Oracle and others to corner the market, integrating applications continues to be an important issue for contemporary businesses. Applications that can be integrated include finance (e.g. accounts receivable; accounts payable), supply chain and customer relationship software applications. Philipson continues:

Enterprise applications, by whatever name, remain at the core of most organisations’ information processing. Integration continues to be important but the focus is shifting to integrating applications across organizations, not just within them. The journey has scarcely begun.

My own research into e-business in education supports Philipson’s view that the journey has scarcely begun. In fact, many educational organisations lag behind the corporate sector, in integrating applications. Where educational organisations are most sluggish is in is electronically linking teaching delivery with back office support. On the other hand, I am aware of some outstanding educational organisations that are electronically linking the front office, back office and supply chain.

IT expert Graeme Philipson has accepted an invitation to address, in early September, the NSW ACE Entrepreneurs’ Group that I facilitate, so I am very much looking forward to hearing more about these trends in the corporate sector. The e-business/e-education journey continues.

I am currently undertaking a research project funded by the Flexible Learning Advisory Group (FLAG) as part of its ‘Policy and Research Program - Engaging Industry in Flexible Learning - Applied Research Projects’. I began the study in June 2004 and will complete it in November 2004.

My project’s title is ‘The identification of transferable flexible learning strategies and models for the Meat and Food Processing Industries – in regional Australia’.

Part of the context for the project is that Australia needs vibrant regional and rural communities and economies that are attractive to new migrants and to other Australians. To be attractive, regional and rural communities need world-competitive industries providing sustainable jobs and security for their populations. Cost-effective, flexible training in regional industries is one of the keys to realising this vision for regional Australia.

This research study will identify transferable strategies and models of VET-related training and assessment in the workplace, arising from the evaluation of a range of flexible learning initiatives to be undertaken by Central West Community College (CWCC) in 2004.

CWCC has the full support of the enterprises involved, Simplot (food processing) at Bathurst and Cargill (meat processing) in Wagga Wagga, as well as the relevant industry advisory boards.

The focus of the research is

• to identify new and transferable strategies of VET-related training and assessment practice in the workplace for the meat and food processing Industries, involving the use of a range of flexible learning methods
• to identify models of how RTOs can engage with industries and enterprises in the meat and food processing industries in regional Australia, to apply flexible learning solutions to business problems
• to identify barriers, especially policy barriers, to the take-up of flexible learning in the meat and food processing industries in regional Australia and how can they be overcome.

In focusing on the above three issues, the research will monitor a range of flexible learning methods to be implemented in 2004 at Simplot and Cargill by Central West Community College. Data on innovative approaches will also be obtained from Burrangong Meat Processes in Young.

This week I am visiting Bathurst twice, interviewing staff of the CWCC and of Simplot and viewing operations at Simplot.

Next week I am conducting a workshop on ‘Alternative approaches to change agency and change management  in VET’ at the AUSTAFE National Conference on the Sunshine Coast.

The workshop will address some crucial questions for VET managers and staff who want to improve their organisation’s responsiveness. The questions are:

• How do we bring about change in the organisation?
• How do we ensure these changes are supported by staff and are sustainable?

This workshop will provide participants with a range of theoretical frameworks which can underpin change management and change agency in the VET context, using the following broad definitions:

• Change management is the process of modifying or transforming organisations in order to maintain or improve their effectiveness (Hayes, J., 2002, The theory and practice of change management, Palgrave, Wiltshire, p.22).
• Change agency refers to the ability of a manager or other agent of change to affect the way an organisation responds to change (Hayes 2002, p.17).

The workshop will draw on research I have conducted over the last few years for Reframing the Future, the national professional development and change management initiative funded through the Australian National Training Authority to assist in building the capacity of the VET sector to implement the national training system.

Opportunities to consider how Reframing the Future project teams and individuals have put that theory into practice will be provided through interactive discussion and activities.

Participants will be encouraged to review the reports I have produced by Reframing the Future on these topics and which are available from the website: http://reframingthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ then ‘Sub-program 2’). See particularly The Never-ending Quest and The Skilling of VET Change Agents.

I have been asked to give a presentation in October to a State/Territory Training Authority (STA), which will remain anonymous, on what an STA can do to foster innovation in its vocational education and training (VET) community. This is a fascinating topic, not least because innovation cannot be prescribed or dictated. It is also an interesting topic because STAs are one step removed from practitioners, who need to lead any innovation in teaching. 

On the other hand, my research provides some clues about what STAs can do to facilitate innovation. Consider the following research findings.

Firstly, innovation can be stimulated by deliberate, intentional activities, such as conducting group discussions between VET practitioners and others to generate new ideas and to encourage research and reflection. Much can be achieved by creating a climate conducive to risk-taking and facilitating the sharing of ideas. My research finds that VET practitioners often stimulate innovation through the use of action learning sets, structured staff discussions, presentations from guest speakers, participation in conferences, or visits to other establishments where they may observe or benchmark. In addition to these structured approaches, innovation sometimes benefits from a contributor’s incidental or informal learning. 

Secondly, innovation can be facilitated or hindered by a range of organisational factors such as the organisation’s structure, culture, planning strategies and communication systems. For instance, innovation can be assisted if organisations remove rigid, bureaucratic hierarchies and develop cultures that value leadership, creativity, trial-and-error experimentation and thinking about the future and how it can be realized differently. Innovation sometimes can be assisted by structured planning and other times by a flexible approach to planning which leaves open the possibility of responding to unexpected changes. Communication systems can assist innovation, where innovative suggestions or ideas are shared across teams and organisational units, with a minimum of censorship.

These are just two of the findings from my research which STAs can interrogate, in developing a systemic approach to fostering innovation. If you look inside the above paragraphs, they present direct challenges to Registered Training Organisations and indirect challenges to STAs. However, fostering innovation in a VET system is critically important to the vibrancy, health and future development of VET, so this STA is to be commended for investigating the topic.

See also my posting on 11 August on defining innovation.

Set out below is a range of benefits, for organisations and their stakeholders, arising from the application of e-business principles and processes to online learning:

• Improved levels of student services. The introduction of back-office e-business applications such as online finance systems and electronic student information systems can result in improved services to students, e.g. for online payment and students accessing their records online, enabling the organisation to better meet its customer service objectives.
• New student markets. E-marketing facilitates the pursuit of and access to new student markets, which can be offered online learning among a suite of digital services.
• New brands. E-marketing enables educational organisations to develop new brands, to cater for target markets of online learners.
• New profit sources. E-business gives educational organisations new ways to provide services and to make a profit.
• New harnessing of intellectual assets. E-business facilitates the knowledge management of digital data and gives providers the ability to harness and deliver to the student more of the digitised, intellectual assets of the organisation, not just to inform online learning but to enrich all electronic services.
• New relationships with customers. The development of new relationships with customers, based on more frequent contact and better understanding of students’ needs can be facilitated by e-business software systems such as Customer Relationship Management.
• Relationships for life. Through ongoing electronic communication, e-business facilitates the development by the educational organisation of a relationship for life with the student, not just during the students’ initial enrolment.
• Repeat business. Electronic communication also facilitates repeat business, a key to profitable business.
• New customer-centric models. E-business encourages a more customer-centric, demand-driven approach to service delivery.
• Customisation of services. E-business allows for customisation of digital data, to differentiate products and for the delivery to different target markets
• New business alliances. E-business facilitates the development of new relationships and alliances between providers, using shared technological platforms.
• Small business growth. E-business enables small organisations that are nimble to compete in the marketplace.
• Positive cost benefits. The introduction of labour saving practices can lead to the achievement of positive cost benefits, e.g. not having to mail out payslips, not having to publish a handbook.

The above list shows that e-business can position online learning as one of many online customer services and assists VET organisations to be more customer-focused. 

I discuss these ideas further in my 2003 NCVER report E-business and Online Learning: Connections and Opportunities for VET available at

http://www.ncver.edu.au/research/proj/nr2f03vol1.pdf

There are benefits to be gained if online learning is incorporated within an e-business framework.

The benefits of applying e-business principles and processes to online learning are different for customers and for the provider organisation. Benefits for customers include user choice and access to personalised services delivered electronically. Benefits for organisations include increased market reach and enhanced relationships with customers.

A range of benefits for customers arising from the application of e-business principles and processes to online learning includes the following:

• 24x7x352 service availability. Students potentially can access online learning and many other electronic services twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, from home or work or when travelling.
• Fast response to enquiries. Students can receive, electronically, relevant and detailed responses to requests in seconds, rather than in days or weeks via the telephone or post.
• Customer-customer interaction. Students can interact with other customers in virtual communities to exchange ideas as well as to compare experiences.
• Customers can compare services. Potential students can compare prices, response times and value added services from educational organisations offering e-business services, providing students with a choice of both providers and products.
• New suite of electronic services. Within an e-business framework, students and all potential customers benefit from online learning being positioned as just one of a range of online services made available electronically. Other electronic services include online enrolment, payment, library access and course information, timetables, results, careers resources and employment information, as well as counselling and support services.
• Personalisation of services. E-business facilitates the personalisation of products and services, including the provision of individual web pages for each student.

I discuss these ideas further in my 2003 NCVER report E-business and Online Learning: Connections and Opportunities for VET available at

http://www.ncver.edu.au/research/proj/nr2f03vol1.pdf

Change agents operating within their own organisation – what we call ‘internal’ change agents – often struggle to win legitimacy.

Paton and McCalman (2003) note that winning credibility is a challenge right from the start of a change management activity:

In terms of entry into a change management process as a facilitator, the internal change agent has to convince management and employees within a particular part of the organisation of their expertise in this area (p.189).

Buchanan and Badham (2000) also note:

This is a game of credentials, in which reputations established through time are important assets. The credibility of the players is crucial: will individuals keep to their goals and agendas and promises? (p.206)

Paton and McCalman believe that the internal change agent is constrained by his or her involvement and participation in the organisation and by his or her specified role which others may seek to exploit to their advantage (p.189).

The internal change agent may also be driven by the ‘intrinsic or extrinsic rewards associated with a successful change project’ (p.192).

Paton and McCalman acknowledge that this might also apply to the external consultant who is paid by someone within the organisation to operate as a change agent. These ‘external change agents’ may slant the approach to fit with the views of the person paying him or her.

My research shows that performing as a change agent – whether as an internal or an external change agent – is a complex undertaking requiring sophisticated skills, appropriate attitudes and extensive knowledge.

I discuss these issues further in Chapters 1 and 5 of my 2004 ANTA report The Skilling of VET Change Agents available from http://reframingthefuture.net (click on Publications then on Sub-program 2).

In the last few weeks policy papers in the UK and Australian education sectors have headlined e-learning. I am uneasy about a growing trend of policy makers to foreground e-learning and to push into the background the concept of flexible learning. This unease stems from the fact that there is now a rich vein of thinking around flexible learning that links it to contemporary business practice, while e-learning on its own provides fewer links to core business strategies. I have found that e-learning is better protected by nesting it within a flexible learning framework.

Let’s consider the rationale for flexible learning in contemporary education. My own research in recent years shows that there is widespread agreement with the idea that flexible learning is a philosophy and not simply a methodology; but it is a philosophy describing how the VET organisation can be positioned as a service business as well as how learning can occur. Interviewees and survey respondents in my various studies generally confirm that flexible learning is fundamental to the survival of their organisations. Flexible learning in VET emerges from my research as an aid to achieving corporate goals such as improved customer services and enhanced competitive advantage. It is representative of the way business is ideally conducted in VET organisations today.

Further, my research shows that flexible learning is ultimately contributing to a customer-centred approach to the provision of VET. In the current decade, ‘flexibility’ in flexible learning is increasingly about providing extra or added value to students and other customers. While the definition of and approach to flexible learning in VET in the early 1990s emphasised two themes – access and equity on the one hand, and learner-centredness on the other – the definition of flexible learning emerging from my research takes those two imperatives for granted. The emerging definition places a new emphasis on the value of flexible learning for the individual customer and for the enterprise that requires training.

As a result of these findings, it is possible to identify the following additional examples of flexibility that are derived from a customer-centric approach to the provision of VET:

• some educational organisations offer customers self-service while others provide a mix of self-service and hands-on instruction
• some customise educational opportunities for individuals or groups while others modify generic offerings
• and some pitch to markets of only one person and others seek mass markets.

This customer-centred approach is the language of contemporary business, used by authors such as Cortada (2001) who notes that in the contemporary world customers

• are more in control because they have increased access to information
• can negotiate better terms and conditions for goods and services
• can return goods faster
• can change suppliers quicker, more frequently and easier than in the past (pp.18-27).

Latchem and Hanna (2001) note that customers have increased expectations of educational organisations:

Many of today’s students are fee-paying. They are more knowledgeable, more discerning, more assertive and more market-oriented. They expect quick outcomes, quality, currency and applicability in their learning, not hype…They expect good ‘customer relationship management’ and some require ‘customer intimacy’, for example, through Web-based customisation (p.17).

Latchem and Hanna (2001) conclude that it is imperative that all educational and training providers see their central mission and purpose as ‘satisfying the customer’s needs’ (p.17).

Flexible learning provides direct links to contemporary business thinking about customer-centred business structure and practices. Proponents of e-learning may wish to  better protect the interests of e-learning by aligning e-learning with flexible learning. Putting it another way, if policy makers want to see a surge in the use of e-learning, then e-learning needs to be tied closer to customer demand - both conceptually and in practice.

If, on the other hand, policy makers want e-learning to subsume the conceptual framework and practices of contemporary flexible learning, then more sophisticated definitions of e-learning are required.  

I am currently involved in various programs which are encouraging the development of skills in forming networks, particularly between providers of training and industry clients. I find that many providers have only a rudimentary conceptual framework for understanding the nature of networks: they have not thought much about how networks function. But when I talk to these providers about the theory of networks and invite them to critique their own networks using this theory, they normally have an ‘ah ha’ response: network theory resonates with their own experiences.

I would just like to discuss one aspect of networking theory here: the concept of open or closed networks; or networks with and without closure. Imagine five people in a network: person A, B, C, D and E. In a network without closure, or an open network, person A can impact on persons B and C; but B and C are not directly connected, with one linked to D and one to E. In this open network, there are a limited number of shared norms influencing behaviour. However, in a network with closure, the parties are all interlinked and can exert influence on each other to observe agreed norms of behaviour: obligations can be imposed (see Coleman, in Lesser 2000, p.27).

Regarding the various structures of networks, Adler and Kwon (2000) distinguish between those closed networks where there are direct or dense ties or connections between members and those open networks where the ties are weak. Closed or dense networks facilitate the emergence of shared norms and encourage trust among members while open networks may involve lower levels of trust (p.98).

The scope and structure of a network may change during its life, as members seek to gain different benefits from involvement:

• For instance, early in the development of a network, joint goals can be developed and collaborative strategies agreed upon, and at this stage the structure may still be fluid.
• As the network settles into operation, decisions may need to be made about how to gain optimum value from involvement and how to handle complex issues that arise, requiring a more formal and closed structure.
• On the other hand, a long-standing network may only need a loose structure, as there are increasing levels of cooperation, requiring limited coordination and planning.

Interestingly, some theorists argue that networks with weak ties between members have significant value, allowing for the easy flow of information between members without the need for many shared norms (Adler and Kwon 2000, p.98). This is important to note, because to form closed or dense networks may be difficult within many VET settings, where there are so many different stakeholders, from enterprises, to unions, to training organisations, often separated by distance and by different work patterns.

VET practitioners may wish to consider strongly the benefits of open or loosely structured networks, where a closed network is inappropriate or not feasible. For example, research cited by Adler and Kwon (2000) suggests that, in sparse or open networks, brokers who interact with many different community members can disseminate information of value to members without imposing extensive sociability or obligations on people (p.98). The potential activities of VET practitioners as brokers or intermediaries are described by Gientzotis (2003).

Networks are categorised other than by describing them as closed or open. For instance, Fulop and Linstead (1999) provide the following categories: vertical and horizontal networks, pooled and complementary networks, product and service networks and learning networks.

I discuss these concepts further in Chapter 1 of the report Building Industry Training Networks (ANTA, 2004), available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on Publications then click on Sub-program 4).

In a mentoring capacity, I had a detailed conversation with a VET professional earlier this week around the topic of what is strategy in the minds of her colleagues. I would like to set out two alternative definitions of strategy and then return to this conversation.

Browne et al (1999) suggest that strategy is a general view of your business, involving a planned and systematic consideration of how to remain in business:

A strategy is a general view of what sort of business the enterprise is in or should be in, and entails some planned and systematic consideration of how to remain or become successful in that business, addressing factors internal to the organisation, such as its structure and people, and external factors, such as its customers and competitors (p.407).

However, Browne et al (1999) also provide an alternative definition:

An alternative view of strategy is that it is a story, or narrative, which attempts to ‘write’ or account for a whole series of disconnected and emergent elements as they were a unified whole – but more than one such story is possible. These stories then act as guides to action (p.407).

In the extended conversation I had with the VET professional earlier this week, she expressed the view that for a few very senior managers within the organisation, strategy was a planned and systematic framework consisting of goals and action plans. However, she believed that, in the minds of most of the people in her organisation, strategy was a story, their story: each person had a story or narrative about the organisation and how it got to where it is and what it is and what are its capabilities.

It is very important to understand what strategy means for one's colleagues, as it will influence many things, such as the way change is planned and the way new strategies are formulated and the way staff development is constructed. For example, if most people in an organisation think about strategy as if it is a narrative, senior managers would be wise to acknowledge this and attempt to connect with these narratives, not simply impose a clinical and remote set of goals on their colleagues.

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to senior managers who are under pressure from Boards or Councils and/or from central bureaucracies, to produce neat and orderly strategic plans of where the organisation is heading. A compromise I often suggest to senior managers is that they collaboratively develop strategic plans that take into account the fact that many people in their organisation have their own narratives. This is harder than it sounds, as it requires some deft negotiating and some creative wording, but to ignore multiple staff (or stakeholder) narratives is to delude oneself that everyone is sharing the one narrative.

I often mentor groups who attempt to form communities of practice but, for reasons often beyond their control, they do not achieve a fundamental purpose of such communities – the sharing of practice. Instead, members hold back, happy to share general information, but reluctant to disclose and interrogate aspects of their practice, such as how their beliefs about learners and teaching.

With such groups, I suggest they value what they are achieving and not see themselves as failures. In many cases, the group is operating like a network, not a community of practice, and networks are also to be valued. A network is not inferior to a community of practice – it is just different. Let’s look at the definitions of both.

To clarify the unique features of networks, Wenger and Snyder (2000) distinguish between networks and three other work structures, as follows:

• work teams deliver a product or service;
• project teams seek to accomplish a specific task;
• communities of practice develop members’ capabilities and exchange knowledge;
• networks collect and pass on knowledge.

The above definition of networks is too narrow, according to Cohen and Prusak (2001, p.56), who find that both networks and communities of practice are groups of people brought together by common interests, experiences, goals, or tasks; and both imply regular communication and bonds characterised by some degree of trust and altruism.

However, Cohen and Prusak (2001 p.56) believe that networks are different to communities of practice in a number of ways:

• communities of practice are harder to organise, maintain and sustain, and are often intense, high-effort and short-term
• networks are simpler to organise, rely mostly on mutual needs and are often long-lasting.

Networks are also different to communities of practice in other ways:

• communities of practice enforce norms but networks are often too diffuse to do so;
• communities of practice have a type of closed membership while networks are open;
• and communities of practice have a shared domain of knowledge while networks are less concentrated in their focus (Cohen and Prusak 2001, p.56).

While networks are different to communities of practice, they are of value to both the individual and organisations:

Though network building mainly happens between individuals, it contributes to an organisation’s social capital. Many of the benefits individuals derive from networks and communities – a sense of membership and purpose, recognition, learning and knowledge – can also pay huge benefits to the organisation (Cohen and Prusak 2001, pp.60-61).

Networks are not inferior to communities of practice. Both have high value. Both are needed in VET.

Today I drafted a paper - as lead author for a conference paper - on measuring the return on investment (ROI) of a leadership program. The paper raises the issue that conventional ROI studies do not suit many educational settings.

There is a growing interest in Australia in calculating the return on investment (ROI) from training. However, ROI studies suit training which has easily quantified outcomes, like how many more cars did a car salesman sell after attending a crash course on how to sell cars. ROI studies are fine in principle but may not suit all contexts.

The interest driving ROI studies of training is admirable. Shandler (1996, p.101) notes that the increased interest in measuring the costs and benefits of training is due the paradigm shift in training over the last ten years. Training is often now linked to specific business needs and it addresses specific objectives. In a time when new business needs are being driven by global competition and new technologies, accountability of all business functions is increasing. This new corporate reality requires an organisational mindset that measures changes in business results attributable to training.

Phillips (1997) suggests that there are four theoretical benefits of an ROI study, all of which are worthy pursuits:

• to measure the contribution of specific programs to corporate objectives and in that process, to determine if the benefits (expressed in monetary terms), outweigh the costs
• to enable the setting of priorities, based on a program’s level of contribution to meeting corporate objectives
• to enable a focus on results
• can alter management perceptions that training is an investment and not an expense.

Pepper and Christie (2000) define the ROI process as showing the bottom-line impact of training and development programs and corporate initiatives. ROI also serves as a tool to demonstrate accountability within the organisation.

However, the term return on investment originates from the finance and accounting field (Moy in Smith, ed. 2001), so it is easier to apply the concept to a professional development program that leads to quantifiable outcomes such as an increase in sales than to professional development programs that lead to improved leadership or interpersonal skills.

In the ROI study of a major Australian agency’s leadership program which I am reporting on in a conference paper, I discuss how the ROI study was unable to highlight properly the qualitative findings from the program. To compensate, I used some other strategies.

In my work as an evaluator, I use a flexible approach to ROI. I also use several alternative strategies. Education is such a large industry, it does not have to use an ROI model built for the manufacturing and other industries: it deserves and can have its own variations of ROI frameworks.

Earlier this week I had a meeting with a VET professional about a raft of organisational development issues at her large TAFE Institute. Just one of the topics we discussed was how to foster communities of practice.

But first a definition is required. There are many definitions of communities of practice in the literature but a simple and useful one provided by Lesser & Storck (2001, p.831) is that they are ‘a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on their common interests’.

Although they recognise that each community is unique in the type of support it requires from the organisation, Lesser and Everest (2001) provide some general guidelines for communities of practice that can be applied in many situations: 

1. Focus resources on communities that have strategic implications for the organisation
2. Provide the community with the time and space to interact
3. Designate roles and responsibilities to support the community
4. Market the community and its success stories. 

Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) suggest seven principles for cultivating communities of practice:

1. Design for evolution, so that the community can grow and change, for instance when new members bring new interests to the group
2. Open a dialogue between the inside and outside perspective, with insiders providing deep understanding of the community issues and outsiders helping members to see wider possibilities
3. Invite different levels of participation, allowing members to participate in ways that suit their level of interest
4. Develop both public and private community spaces, so that all levels of relationships can flourish. Public spaces are meetings and using an online forum; private spaces are one-on-one encounters, either face-to-face or electronically.
5. Focus on value, because communities thrive when they deliver value to the organisation and to the members
6. Combine familiarity and excitement, satisfying members’ needs for both comfort and divergent thinking
7. Create a rhythm for the community, through regular meetings, teleconferences, online interactions and informal events, mixing idea-sharing forums and tool-building projects (pp.49-64).

Fostering and supporting communities of practice requires high-level skills. To develop these high-level skills we can tap into useful literature on communities of practice and the increasing expertise in the VET sector. But there is no escaping the subtle, sophisticated work involved.

I discuss these and related isssues in Chapter 3 of my report The Potential for Communities of Practice to Underpin the National Training Framework.

The report is available at http://reframiningthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 4).

There are numerous models available for explaining how innovations are adopted, but one of the models that grabbed attention at the start of the 1990s was promoted by Geoffrey Moore. You may remember parts of it, such as the terminology he popularised - 'early adopters' and 'laggards'.

Moore first set out his model about ‘the technology adoption life cycle’ in Crossing the Chasm in the early 1990s when he suggested that different people adopt a technology or innovation in the following sequence:

• innovators (technology enthusiasts) adopt the innovation first
• then early adopters (visionaries)
• then the early majority (pragmatists)
• then the late majority (conservatives)
• then the laggards (skeptics).

The ‘chasm’ that he refers to in the title of his first book is the gap – or period in time – between the adoption of technology by the early adopters and the early majority. Mostly Moore was referring to different market segments, not people in your organization.

In his second book, Inside the Tornado (1995), Moore saw a time-split in market acceptance of a technology, as follows:

• in a first stage, the new technology gains acceptance among early majority (pragmatists) in one or more niche market
• in a later stage, the technology has passed the test of usefulness and is now perceived as necessary and standard for many applications.

Guess who are Moore’s major reference sites? Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, PeopleSoft etc. Starting to worry that Moore’s ‘technology adoption life cycle’ has little to do with either your organization or your customers?

In the most recent edition of Harvard Business Review (July-August 2004), Moore has extended his earlier theories in an article entitled ‘Darwin and the Demon: Innovating within established enterprises’. The article suggests that 'innovation comes in many forms – products, processes, marketing, business models, and more. Which kind of innovaton should you be pursuing? It depends on where you are in your product category’s life cycle'. Moore now tacks on to the ‘technology adoption life cycle’ a ‘market development life cycle’ and advocates that companies ride the market life cycle. Companies need to determine where they are along a time sequence as follows:

• Disruptive innovation
• Application innovation
• Product innovation
• Process innovation
• Experiential innovation
• Marketing innovation
• Business model innovation
• Structural innovation.

From the brief description I have given, does this expanded model appeal to you? On the one hand, there is probably some value in aspects of his expanded model, in that products such as Microsoft Office go through stages in the market, so different types of innovation are required at each different stage. On the other hand, most of us work for or with companies that do not sell Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes or Apple Macs, so the value of the model starts to decline.

In my experience, Moore’s models appeal to the need in us for answers and solutions. These models can make us feel more in control during the chaos that often accompanies innovation. While the models offer fragments of value that may be useful in our situations, overall the models distract us from confronting the awkward reality that markets and individual people vary in their responses to new technologies. Sorry to disappoint. Or perhaps you have already bought the dream and I can’t dissuade you.

Much of my work with professionals and their organisations is implicitly about knowledge management, but the term knowledge management is not easily defined. Some further explanation of the term is due.

In the mid-late 1990s, the concept of knowledge management became popular in the western world, based on the belief that a company’s strategic advantages often hinged on the knowledge of staff. Database companies were quick to suggest that the key to managing the knowledge of staff was to somehow channel all corporate knowledge into databases.

However, definitions of knowledge such as the following by McDermott and Snyder (2002, pp.8-14) stress the different types of knowledge that might exist in an organisation and which cannot be captured solely in a database:

• Knowledge lives in the human act of knowing. The knowledge of experts such as surgeons is an accumulation of experience that remains dynamic: part of their ongoing experience. Communities of Practice make knowledge an integral part of their activities and interactions, and they serve as a living repository for that knowledge.
• Knowledge is tacit as well as explicit. Not everything we know can be codified as documents or tools. In business, tacit knowledge, such as a deep understanding of the complex systems in an industry or in VET, is sometimes more valuable than explicit knowledge. Sharing tacit knowledge involves interaction and informal learning processes such as storytelling and coaching of the kind that Communities of Practice provide.
• Knowledge is social as well as individual. A body of knowledge, say about the NTF, is developed through communal involvement, not just from reading documents. 
• Knowledge is dynamic. What makes knowledge management a challenge is that knowledge is not static: it is not an object that can be stored, owned and moved around like a document. Knowledge resides in the skills, understanding and relationships of its members as well as in tools, documents and processes.

If one accepts such a multi-layered definition of knowledge, ‘managing’ such different types of knowledge requires a new response by managers. Both individuals and organisations within VET will benefit if managers encourage staff to collaborate and share their knowledge with their peers and across the organisation.

From my own research, I have found that the structure of a community of practice provides an ideal platform for such sharing of knowledge. On the other hand, communities of practice are complex, subtle and challenging undertakings, which require managers to use skills and knowledge not previously part of their conventional duties.

I discuss these concepts further in my report The Potential for Communities of Practice to Underpin the National Training Framework, available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 4’).

I recently conducted research on networks in VET which underlined the extensive benefits of networks to both participants and organisations.

Cohen and Prusak (2001, pp.61) find that networks provide an interlocking web of connections and help people develop their identities. Additionally, they find that:

• membership of a network implies a commitment to the group and its work and to cooperation
• network membership implies connection, based around the trust, understanding, and mutuality that support collaborative, cohesive action.

My research found that:

• networks help individuals to acquire new information and resources and share with their peers their explicit and tacit knowledge about their profession
• networks encourage members to reflect on and potentially improve their own practice
• networks help people further develop their identities, in this case, as VET practitioners or collaborators
• networks enable individuals to learn more about their own organisation – which is the common focus of networks reported on in the literature
• networks also enable individuals to learn about industry, if they are a provider, or about providers if they are from industry.

Cohen and Prusak (2001, p.61) find that many of the benefits that individuals derive from networks and communities – a sense of membership and purpose, recognition, learning, and knowledge – can also provide benefits for the organisation. Networks and communities contribute to the development of social capital in organisations, defined by Cohen and Prusak (2001) as a company’s stock of human connections:

Social capital consists of the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviour that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible (p.4).

In addition to developing social capital, Alter and Hage (quoted in Fulop and Linstead 1999, p.446) find that the business benefits of organisations working together include:

• opportunities to learn and adapt and to develop competencies or products
• a gain of resources – time, money, information, raw materials, legitimacy, status
• an ability to manage uncertainty and to solve invisible and complex problems
• an ability to specialise or diversify and to fend off competitors
• rapid responses to changing market demands.

Many different types of organisations were involved in the 2003 networks I studied, from enterprises, to industry associations, to provider groups, to government agencies. The benefits of participation for these groups varied, but the benefits were many, including:

• developing a better understanding of each other’s needs
• working together on training programs
• creating a climate of trust for future collaboration.

The findings from the 2003 networks confirm research by Ford et al (2003) who found that networks are essential to viability in contemporary business:

All companies are becoming more dependent on their relationships with those around them. And all these companies and relationships must cope with pressures and capitalise on opportunities from wider afield in the network (p.xi).

My research on networks is contained in the following report for ANTA - Building Industry Training Networks - available from http://reframingthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ and then click on ‘sub-program 4’).

I will be contributing a regular column to the national weekly newspaper Campus Review, starting in the next edition, under the by-line ‘John Mitchell’s INside VET’. My overall interest in writing this column will be in answering this  question: how is the VET sector going about continually improving its national contribution? In the column I will focus on micro or local developments that contribute to the macro impact of VET.

My aim in this column is to push past the curtains of policies, regulations, jargon and media spin that may prevent us from clearly seeing into the sector. My intention is to provide an alternative set of windows to view how VET practitioners and organisations go about improving their performance. Implicitly, my interests are organisational strategy, performance improvement, customer service, new practices, leadership, strategic management, change management and  professional development – the same topics addressed in this blog.

The column will show that we need multiple windows to view the breadth of VET experience. Depending on which window we look through, we will be able to see transformational leaders, strategic managers, entrepreneurs and innovators, visionary corporate services personnel and highly adaptable teachers and trainers. We will also see a vast array of students, from apprentice to degree level, with a variety of learning styles and social needs. 

But almost every window will show that VET organisations consist of human beings who have different perspectives and different capabilities. Hence the column will point to the multiple goals, pressures, anxieties, hopes and achievements of the people and organisations in the sector. I enjoy working deep inside this sector and intend to use this column to bring to life the richness, complexities, tensions, excitement and humaneness of VET.

A regular column can only capture a slice of the variegated nature of the VET sector, so I propose to connect the column with this blog site, where I can extend my commentary and cover other related matters.