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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.  

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.

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 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.

In an earlier posting I reported on an evaluation I conducted of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, UK) trainee schemes in early 2004. As part of that evaluation, a benchmarking activity was undertaken with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), comparing its experiences with trainee schemes with the BBC’s experiences. Some points from the study of the ABC follow.

Over the last two decades the ABC has conducted entry-level workbased trainee schemes, combining paid work and structured training, irregularly: the last major intake was in the mid 1980s, when a total of around 20 operational trainees and 10 technical trainees were taken on in TV and radio. Smaller intakes have been accepted since then and graduate-level trainee schemes have been conducted even less consistently.

Jenny Ferber, Head of Training at the ABC, and who approved this posting, has encouraged discussion of the issues around trainees within the ABC, originally tabling a discussion paper. Currently she is leading the development of a new policy on the matter. The new policy is expected to suggest more efficient processes, such as common reporting and linking all trainee schemes, where possible, to the national qualifications.

Jenny Ferber is supportive of national qualifications for a number of reasons, including the fact that they ensure a minimum but satisfactory and consistent standard. However, she will withdraw her support if the national qualifications framework, particularly Training Packages, fails to ‘keep up’ with changes in the industry.

Key findings from the benchmarking included the following:

• There are many more similarities between the ABC and BBC trainee schemes than differences.  Key similarities include the needs such as replacing existing staff; hindrances such as a lack of jobs for every trainee; a commitment to diversity; and the use of internal accreditation.
• Some differences between the ABC and the BBC include the stronger commitment to national qualifications by the ABC – provided the Australian national training framework remains current.
• The ABC is undertaking a review of its trainee schemes in 2004 and will produce a new policy paper shortly. Like the BBC, the ABC intends that its new policy will clarify the value of different types of schemes and will ensure consistently high standards of outputs, partly through central coordination of some aspects of the schemes.

Given the way it is continually seeking to improve itself, the ABC meets the criterion for a high-performing organisation that I identified in relation to the BBC: humility. In the case of the ABC, humility means continually seeking to improve systems and impacts.

This study reinforces a number of other issues current in VET:

• The BBC is benchmarking with the ABC because the UK and Australia are both part of the global economy.
• For Australian companies to be on the pace internationally, our training needs to be world-class.
• Training in the ABC is comparable in quality to the BBC, which is encouraging for Australian VET, but the ABC, like the BBC, is seeking to improve its training even further. The high jump bar for Australian training keeps rising.

In a recent blog entry I highlighted the emergence of a new characteristic of high-performing organisations: humility. 

I take humility to mean a willingness to listen to staff and clients and to review all current and past structures and assumptions. Humble, high-performing organisations willingly embrace new ideas, new approaches, new systems and new relationships. People guiding high-performing organisations continually learn and are agile in their response to their new learning.

I saw an excellent example of organisational humility when I undertook an assignment for the BBC in London earlier this year. My task was to frame up and commence an evaluation of the long-cherished in-house training within the BBC.

The corporation has delivered trainee schemes for several decades and spends around AUD$25m per annum on these schemes and a total of AUD$125 pa on training and development. Although the claim that one was ‘BBC trained’ is respected around the world, the BBC wanted a thorough analysis undertaken of BBC internal training. Humility at work.

In interviewing a range of BBC trainees, both current and past, and a range of staff, I was struck by a number of responses to the evaluation:

• the desire of BBC management that the existing trainee schemes be benchmarked against the best in the world, to make sure the BBC was still on the pace
• the determination of BBC management that the trainee schemes be critiqued to make sure there were consistently high standards of training delivery
• the attitude of interviewees that the reputation of the BBC trainee schemes could only be maintained by continuous improvement, not clinging on to past glories. 

For me, the BBC is high-performing because of such humility.

From my work around Australia, I know that Harvard Business School's John Kotter is among the most popular change theorists. However, informed organisations modify Kotter's change management model to suit specific contexts.

A proponent of emergent change, John Kotter is the author of books such as Leading Change (1996) and John Kotter on What Leaders Really Do (1999). Kotter advocates eight steps in the change process, from establishing a sense of urgency, to creating a guiding coalition and more. Kotter considers the eight stages to be a process and not a checklist and that most major change efforts comprise a host of small and medium-sized change projects (Burnes, 2001, pp.296-297). 

Burnes (2000, p.280) explains that the emergent approach to change starts from the assumption that change is a continuous, open-ended and unpredictable process of aligning and re-aligning an organisation to its changing environment. Burnes (2000) explains that the emergent approach is increasingly popular in the contemporary world:

Advocates of Emergent change argue that it is more suitable to the turbulent environment in which modern firms now operate because, unlike the Planned approach, it recognises that it is vital for organisations to adapt their internal practices and behaviour to changing external conditions (p.280).

The external environment for sectors such as VET and ACE are continually changing, suggesting that the use of an emergent change model like Kotter's will often be appropriate.

While Kotter’s approach is popular, there are a number of criticisms or cautions about his approach which deserve mention:

• First, the Kotter approach assumes that every manager can be a change leader, while overlooking specialist skills required of change agents (Burnes, 2000, p. 297). In response to those situations that need a specialist change agent, the national professional development program Reframing the Future <http:reframingthefuture.net> launched a new sub-program in early 2003 called National Training Change Agents, to highlight the specialist skills required of change agents.
• Second, the Kotter approach is sometimes criticised for not showing enough concern for the reasons why resistance to change emerges (King & Anderson, 2002, p.203). It is odd that Kotter is seen as downplaying resistance to change, as he was initially famous because of his insights into resistance. Perhaps books on resistance will sell less well than books on how to bring about change.
• Third, despite his claim that he does not have a set against managers, Kotter often portrays leaders as transforming organisations while he views managers as they were depicted in 1970s behaviourist texts, as focusing on planning, budgeting and controlling. Contemporary literature on management, such as that provided by Cusumano & Markides (2001), views managers as ‘value creators’ and strategists, far removed from the behaviourist manager of the 1970s. Kotter seems to over-emphasise leadership and under-state the importance of management.
• Fourth, Kotter's popularity in Australia shows an Australian bias towards USA change models, as my recent work in the UK showed me there is much less interest in USA models there. Australians need to question whether the Kotter model, predominantly based on USA examples, is entirely transferable to the cultures of Australian organisations.

In summary, Kotter is not without his critics. While Kotter's model has value, it is not suitable in every instance and needs to be critiqued and modified to suit each setting.

While Kotter’s model is popular in VET, a range of other models is available and are used around VET, as the nature of change will be different not only from one  organisation to the next, but from one section of an organisation to another section. It is appropriate that different groups of managers use different change management models to suit their particular contexts.

I discuss various adaptations of Kotter and other change management models in chapter 4 of Mitchell, J.G. (2003), Strategy-making in Turbulent Times, ANTA, Melbourne (available at http://reframingthefuture.net click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 2').

In mentoring change agents in the vocational education and training (VET) sector, one of my practices is to table with them a range of different models for how change needs might be diagnosed and change introduced. I find that aspiring change agents greet these models with enthusiasm. They also are comfortable taking up my suggestion that any text-book model for change management needs to be modified to suit the organisation they are seeking to change.

However, I find aspiring change agents are much less comfortable when I ask them to postpone the examination of 'how to do it' models, and to first examine the model they have in their head about how organisations work. Mostly this request draws a mystified look from the trainee change agent and I often get the response that 'I don't have a model for how organisations work'.

I use a range of different techniques to help practitioners see that we all have models in our heads of how organisations work. Sometimes it is easy to detect the model, based on the language practitioners use to describe their own organisation. Metaphors are a key.

Gareth Morgan (1997), in his seminal book Images of Organisations, summarises the most popular models or images that we have of organisations. These include the image of an organisation as a machine – an image popular with those who see the different parts of an organisation as the interlocking parts of a machine. Other popular images of organisations are as follows: 

• organisations are like organisms,
• or brains,
• or cultures,
• or political battlegrounds,
• or psychic prisons.

Morgan finds that each of us brings models such as these to our analysis of organisations, although our model may not be so clearly formulated and we may not be very aware of our model.

Such personal models of organisations influence the way each of us views an organisation and will influence how we go about planning and managing change. It is advisable for change agents to identify their own models of organisations before seeking out other people's 'how to do it' change management models.

If we are unaware of our existing model for how organisations function, we will select a model for change which suits our view of the world, but not other people's. Change management is about understanding multiple views of the world, including our own.

I explore these issues in chapter 2 of the report Mitchell, J.G. (2004), The Skilling of VET Change Agents, ANTA, Melbourne (available at http://reframingthefuture.net click on 'Publications' and then click on 'Sub-program 2').

Bookstores are often crammed with ‘how to do it’ guides to change management. Some of these books reduce change management to five or ten or ‘n’ easy steps, mischievously suggesting that the same 5-10 steps can be applied in every situation.

I mentor many change agents who commonly find that the models for change that are so prominent in the literature don’t ever fit neatly with the change agents’ complex environments (Mitchell, 2004, p.33). 

Collins (Organisational Change. Sociological Perspectives, Routledge, London and New York, 2003) criticises management theorists who produce programmatic or schematic guides to managing change in organisations: what he calls ‘n-step guides for change’ (p.83). His typical example of the schematic n-step change model is as follows:

1. Develop strategy
2. Confirm top level support
3. Use project management approach
• Identify tasks
• Assign responsibilities
• Agree deadlines
• Initiate action
• Monitor
• Act on problems
• Close down
4. Communicate results (p.83).

Collins suggests there are three key features of simplistic n-step change models:

A rational analysis of organisational change
A sequential approach to the planning and management of change
A generally up-beat and prescriptive tone (p.84).

Collins criticises n-step guides because they downplay the existence of conflict and the breadth of personalities in organisations and they sanitise the change process (p.127):

Unlike the organisations assumed to exist in n-step guides, organisations are not peopled by workers who naturally share a common consensus. Instead, people adhere, to a greater or lesser degree, to their own value system…We must, therefore, be realistic about the extent to which managers (or the state) could effectively erase such a complex, plural, deep-rooted and socially maintained set of values (p.127).

These comments are a reminder that simplistic recipes for change management  will rarely be appropriate.

I report on this matter in Mitchell, J.G. (2004), The Skilling of VET Change Agents, ANTA, Melbourne at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ and then on Sub-program 2).

Three different clients have asked me in the last week about the definition of a high-performing organisation.

I believe the definition is always changing, as organisations find new and different ways to respond to their environment and to improve their internal processes. But there are few definitions of a high-performing organisation in the Australian literature.

Four years ago, a valuable definition of a high performing organisation was provided by Dr Ken Moss, in the Business Council of Australia’s report on workplace reform (BCA, 2000), in setting out a range of questions and challenges facing Australia. He also provided a description of high-performing enterprises, as characterised by creativity, innovation, flexibility and competitiveness:

How can Australian enterprises grasp and create new opportunities emerging from globalisation, technological change and the knowledge economy? How can we create leading, high-performance workplaces that are characterised by creativity, innovation, flexibility and competitiveness? Workplaces where people choose to work and give freely of their energies and feel a sense of achievement, satisfaction, individual purpose and security. Where there is synergy between personal missions and work challenges, and organisational achievement. And where the workplace sense of community contributes to social cohesion. (p.1)

The BCA definition was pre-September 11 2001 and the Ansett collapse three days later. Since 2000 whole industry sectors have experienced shake-ups, driven by new technologies or new competition or new products, such as banking and IT, tourism and transport. Also since 2000, customer expectations for personalized and electronic services have soared, evidenced by the way century-old over-the-counter services by banks have been replaced by a raft of new electronic services.

Given the changes since the turn of the century, I believe that the BCA definition needs to be extended and sharpened to fit the contemporary world of 2004.

In my work with many organisations around Australia and overseas, I see emerging a range of new characteristics of high-performing organisations. Driven by the ever-increasing trend towards being more customer or client-focused, one of the key new characteristics of high-performing organisations is a surprising one, and jars with the BCA word ‘competitiveness’. The new characteristic is humility.

Ten years ago, humility would have been seen as a sign of a weak organisation. Back then, high-performing organisations were characterized by an arrogance; by a competitive, dog-eat-dog streak; by the need to say we are the best. I have collected vivid examples of such attitudes, which I use in my workshops.

In outstanding organisations nowadays, humility enables senior managers to do the following:

• to listen better to customers;
• to listen better to staff;
• to review all assumptions underpinning current company processes;
• to treat no previous organisational structures as sacred.

My research finds that humility by senior managers also has the following benefits:

• humility leads to the valuing of the tacit and explicit knowledge of staff;
• humility provides a basis for talking to one’s competitors, to investigate possible partnerships;
• humility encourages companies to network and collaborate.

In contemporary Australia, high-performing organisations proudly announce that, on the basis of recent and comprehensive client feedback, the organisation has refurbished last year’s strategic plan and is developing less grandiose and more responsive strategies. Humble, high-performing organisations willingly embrace new ideas, new approaches, new systems and new relationships.

Humility is only one of the new characteristics of high-performing organisations I am tracking, but it is a fundamental one.

A common delusion of the command-and-control school of strategic planning is that the organisation can always align itself with the external environment, achieving a snug 'strategic fit'.

One of the reasons I find it interesting to assist registered training organisations (RTOs) in the vocational education and training (VET) sector is because of the inevitable tensions that exist between the RTO and its external environment. Let’s look at two frequent tensions in the sector:

• firstly, the normal tension between government hopes and the capability of registered training organisations (RTOs);
• secondly, the understandable tensions between industry and RTOs.

There are often tensions between government strategies and what is happening inside of registered training organisations (RTOs), because of the gap between high-flown government goals and difficulties on the ground, inside the RTOs. The legitimate business of government includes aiming high, inspiring the citizenry, moving the country forward, making gains and achieving publicly declared goals. A legitimate aim of government-funded RTOs is to be a vehicle for these government goals: to implement government policies and to demonstrate success. In practice, there is often a large gap between how government aims and RTOs' achievements.  

Tensions arise between government policies and RTO performance for a multitude of reasons. For example, the Government might have changed its policies – say, because of a change of government – and the RTO might have restructured to align its resources with these new policies, but the RTO’s staff might not have the full quota of appropriate attitudes, skills, knowledge or previous experiences to implement the new policies. Also, tensions might arise because the RTO's community may not want what the government policies are promising, at least not as much or as quickly as the government wants, leaving the RTO juggling government hopes and community acceptance rates.

How can RTOs respond, caught between the conflicting demands of government and the community, especially when an RTO's workforce capability is normally calibrated to suit government policies of a previous era?

There are always tensions between the needs of industry and the ability or willingness of RTOs to respond. Because ‘industry’ is often at the mercy of forces beyond its control, including changes in the market such as the entry of new competitors or new products, industry cannot wait until February each year for the local RTO to re-work its long-term strategic plan before the RTO provides relevant training options. RTOs are regularly confronted by the fact that industry is not a neat, homogeneous or static phenomenon:

• old industries disintegrate;
• different industries converge;
• splinter industries emerge;
• new vested interests gain a voice in industry associations.

Industry can appear disorganised, ravaged by conflicting agendas and impatient for RTOs to change.

How can RTOs respond to industry, if industry is regularly in flux? How can RTOs respond if RTOs are locked into rigid, annual strategic planning, which leaves few resources for responding to inconvenient, impatient demands from industry?

One answer to the questions posed above is that RTOs need exceptional skills in continual strategy-making, urgently and from now on, for addressing the everyday tensions in VET.

I provide examples of effective RTO strategy-making in my 2003 report for Reframing the Future, Strategy-making in Turbulent Times, at http://reframingthefuture.net (Click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 2’).

E-education is much more than the provision of e-learning. E-education involves the use of e-business – that is, conducting business electronically – in the front office, back office and supply chain of educational organisations.

My research for the Commonwealth Government indicates that e-business can, potentially, provide a range of benefits for educational organisations: improved efficiencies, additional value for clients, increased speed of transactions, enhanced business partnerships and, sometimes, reduced costs.

See http://www2.dcita.gov.au/ie/publications/2002/06/eb_education for my report E-business in Education.

Ten days ago, the benefits of e-education were articulated clearly in a presentation from Garry Traynor, a member of a Business Development Group I facilitate for the Board of Adult and Community Education. Garry Traynor is Principal of Sydney Community College and an Australian pioneer in the use of e-business in education, commencing in 2000 with a comprehensive plan to integrate the College’s online enrolments with the website and back office processes. See http://www.sydneycommunitycollege.com.au

A major achievement of the College’s e-business initiative was to build a website which is simple, secure, fast, reliable, cost effective, attractive and easy to update. The website provides students with up-to-date information about courses and whether classes are full and enables the student to enrol and pay online.

The benefits of e-business for Sydney Community College are substantial. Improving efficiencies by reducing double handling of enrolments was a key goal achieved by the College’s e-business system. Other benefits include reduced staffing costs for processing enrolments and the provision of additional value for clients.

What is most impressive about the College is that it continually seeks to improve its e-business strategies and systems. For example, the College’s next project is to enable each tutor to electronically update course information on the website.

Sydney Community College confirms some of the findings from my study for the Commonwealth, including that:

• e-business is constantly changing, as new technologies enable the development of new business processes;
• e-business is primarily a business issue, not a technological issue, driven by business goals;
• e-business raises the bar in terms of customer service, in terms of speed, convenience and the breadth of possible services.

While e-education is exciting, it is also continually changing, requiring educational managers, like Garry Traynor, to develop new business knowledge and skills. The role of managers is a key.

It is interesting to see the way the corporate sector is quickly discovering the value of an email database, while the education sector remains hesitant.

I recently arranged for a speaker from an online marketing company to address a group of senior educational managers. The speaker explained how his company helped a large hotel chain acquire an email database of 110,000 Australians in a number of weeks, mostly by offering people the chance to win free accommodation for a weekend. A raffle. People submitting their email addresses were asked twice whether they would be happy to receive future emails, promoting special offers from the hotel chain. Transparent process. Voluntary participation. The customer can choose to be removed from the database at any time. No tricks.  

One of the senior educational managers I work with followed the advice of the marketing expert and placed a similar promo on his college's website, offering visitors to the website the chance to win a voucher to an educational course. He collected 525 email addresses in the first nine days. He is now using these email addresses to market new courses to his database of customers.

This same educational manager, Gerard Newcombe, Executive Director, Manly Warringah Community College, had 40 people on an email database three years ago and now has 5,000. Gerard has reduced his college's annual expenditure on coloured brochures by around 33% and, for almost no cost, emails sections of his brochure to people on his database. He only sends them the sections which they have previously expressed an interest in. Personalised service. Everyone wins.

See the website of Manly Warringah Community College at the following URL: http://www.mwcc.nsw.edu.au/docs/index.php

A challenge I am working on is to persuade other educational managers that compiling and using a database of customers can be undertaken in an entirely ethical manner, while delivering the customer with services he or she wants, and helping the educational organisation achieve more efficiencies and enrolments. But as I find with much of my work, education organisations are often more conservative than their customers.

It was interesting to see an article in this morning's The Australian (5 July 2004; p.10) called 'Old School Ties Bind Again' by Jane Fraser. The article describes the extremely successful SchoolFriends.com online service for linking you and I to our old school mates, or army mates, or university friends, or work mates. For instance, you might be able to find out what your old work mates are up to, if they are at one of the more than over 200,000 workplaces listed on the site.

As Jane Fraser notes, the concept “arises from the simplest (of) concepts - curiosity, the urge for networking, getting back in touch with old school friends and seeing 'what people are up to'.“

The site has more than one million registered members in Australia, out of a population of 20m. Not bad for an operation which started in a programmer's bedroom. A dotcom success story. The founders recently sold the business to a UK company for $3m.

Late last year I invited one of the founders of SchoolFriends.com, Rob Barron, to speak to a group I facilitate for the Board of Adult and Community Education (ACE) in NSW, the Entrepreneurs' Group. I invited Rob to speak, as I believe that ACE is sitting on a gold mine: the desire for its current and previous customers to connect with the local ACE community college for more than just learning. I still believe it.

SchoolFriends.com has shown ACE and TAFE and other educational providers that we human beings have a yearning to belong, to associate with the institutions we have inhabited and to connect with the other people who were there too. 

This need to belong is a fundamental human characteristic that educational systems sometimes overlook, preferring to relate to students through compliance-related frameworks, such as attendance records, assessments, competencies and qualifications. Sometimes we also think that students might be so enraptured with the wizardry of technology, they might be happy to forgo a human connection.

This need to belong is one of the reasons why many online learning programs struggle to keep their students interested if the programs do not provide some human interaction between teacher and student and between student and student. From my many years working in VET, I also know that many ex-students who look to sign up again are looking to re-connect with the person at the front desk or in the library.

This need to belong suggests that educational systems might do better to relate to ex-students as human beings who primarily want to keep in contact with their ex-class mates and ex-students, rather than relate to ex-students as prospective online learning students. Maslow revisited. The message is: think about meeting your students/ex-students' basic needs before selling them a product. Think about all that e-education can provide, not just e-learning.

I investigated the range of different services that educational organisations could provide electronically, beyond just online learning, in the report I prepared for NCVER in 2003: E-business and online learning: connections and opportunities for VET. Like SchoolFriends.com, the report finds that students want much more from their educational organisations than just e-learning.

The challenge is for educational organisations to work out what services their ex-students want and how the ex-students want to access those services. Organisations could start by relating to the ex-students as humans with needs, not as prospective repeat business. If basic needs are satisfied, the repeat business could come later.

Given the volume and popularity of US publications on how to manage, one of my recurring interests as a strategic management consultant is determining whether strategy-making techniques developed in the USA are applicable in Australia – particularly techniques pioneered at massive Fortune 500 companies.

For instance, from my current work with Australian organisations, I know there is some interest in an article about honest strategic conversations published in the February 2004 issue of the HBR. The article by Beer and Eisenstat is called ‘How to have an honest conversation about your business strategy’.

They present a concept called the ‘strategic fitness process’ which senior executives can use to engage their staff in an honest conversation about the barriers blocking strategy implementation. Ideally, the process leads to an increased corporate capacity to impement strategy quickly and effectively.

I recently examined their strategic fitness model with a group of senior VET managers I was assisting and found that one of the attractive features of the model is the way it elicits frank responses from managers, who might otherwise be hesitant to comment on corporate strategy.

As a participant said to me in a recent strategic planning workshop I was conducting, some of the guidelines underpinning the strategic fitness process are also attractive:

• A conversation about strategy needs to move back and forth between advocacy and inquiry.
• The conversation has to be about the issues that matter most.
• The conversation has to be collective and public.
• The conversation has to allow employees to be honest without risking their jobs.
• The conversation has to be structured. Start the conversation with the leadership team.

However, my analysis of the strategic fitness concept has also revealed that the process is not for the faint-hearted: to be effective, it takes conviction, stamina, patience and a high level of facilitation skills. Also, given the depth of resources the process requires, it is unsuitable for small organizations.

I have negotiated with my clients a worthwhile compromise: that is, to develop a customised strategic conversation process that is applicable to their context and to their resources. Same principles, different steps.

In this case, a USA model, with modification, has strong merit.

Much of my work involves strategy-making with VET managers. One of my passions in VET is to expose the limitations of the command-and-control approach to strategic planning: an approach which evolved at and suited General Motors in the USA in the 1930s.  

The command-and-control approach is characterised by a confidence that all necessary strategies for any of our diverse VET organisations can be rationally identified, in a top-down, methodical fashion, like a (nineteenth century, set-piece) battle plan. These long-range strategic plans can then be frozen in a publication for, say, three years, for implementation by the lieutenants and foot soldiers. Heirarchical control. Calculated delegation. Logical implementation. A popular variation of the command and control approach is to say that minor reviews of the three year plan will be conducted annually.

Recently I tried a new technique to challenge the command and control approach, while in Kununurra ten days ago, facilitating a professional development workshop for the Executive of the Kimberley College of TAFE, and assisting with the development of their strategic planning.

I split the Executive into four even-sized groups and gave each of them a different perspective to bring to strategy-making. Besides the command and control perspective, one of the other perspectives included the fatalistic view of the world - that no matter what we do, not much changes.

To put the four perspectives into operation, we agreed on a subject of importance to the Executive - Indigenous training - and each group spoke to the subject from their nominated perspective. I then asked the groups to critique each other, while maintaining their allocated perspective.

To the great credit of the participants, the ensuring debate was extraordinary: the VET managers enthusiastically maintained their appointed roles and the Indigenous issues were suddenly being viewed from four completely different perspectives.

This professional development exercise contributed to the identification of a multi-dimensioned set of strategic objectives for the College, in addressing the very complex set of issues around training for Indigenous people, in a region of Australia with many challenges, including vast distances, heat, floods and sparsely populated settlements. A command and control rationality will never allow us to see the complexities of Indigenous training or any other VET area requiring a corporate strategy.

Two of the ideas I advocate strongly within the VET sector are, firstly, that we are only just beginning to come to grips with e-business in education and, secondly, we need to give much greater attention to continuous strategy-making, not just to the two-three year strategic plan.

See my report on E-business and online learning: connections and opportunities for VET, at http://www.ncver.edu.au/teaching/publications/954.html  and my report on Strategy-making in Turbulent Times at http://reframingthefuture.net - click on ‘Publications’ and then on ‘Sub-program 2’.

Both of these ideas - about e-education and strategy-making - are reinforced by a useful article that appeared in the media last week.  VET can learn from industry about the need for strategy-making skills, particularly from those industries that are caught up in the maelstrom of digitisation and converging technologies.

The need for companies to continually craft new business strategies was the focus of a well-written article which appeared in The Weekend Financial Review 19-20 June 2004. Written by Stephen Baker from New York, and sourced from BusinessWeek, the article is called ‘Digital revolution sets tech industries on collision course’.

The article identifies a heightened push towards convergence, due to ‘faster chips, broader bandwidth and a common Internet standard’. For instance, the market for personal digital assistants, so strong in recent years, is vanishing ‘as customers get the same functions in a mobile phone’. Similarly, new televisions have enough computing power to grab streaming video off the net. An executive from Phillips comments: ‘Digitisation is creating products that can’t be categorized as tech or consumer electronics. The walls are coming down.’

Three forces are driving the change: increased broadband access to the Internet; wireless home computer networks; and the expanded functionality of the mobile phone. These forces will result in new networked ‘machines’, incorporating televisions, computers and mobile phones.

As a result of the convergence, three industries are about to collide: computer and software business; consumer electronics; and the communications industry. Baker notes that none of these industries, much less a single company, can put all the pieces together. ‘They all need help. For this they venture into adjoining territories, where they forge new partnerships and take on new rivals’.

Businesses involved in the convergence will grapple with new questions, such as ‘Will people buy their programming and machines? Or will they rent and subscribe?’ Baker notes that innovative companies will sort out these questions, leading the way in building new business models: ‘Those who figure out how to reach through the networks will be the architects and kings of the converged economy’.

Baker concludes that the clock is ticking, pushing companies into bruising markets far from their roots and their expertise: ‘As the giants struggle to adjust, they’ll face swarms of upstarts that enjoy powerful advantages’. Baker notes that history is on the side of the upstarts: ‘Few companies have made the leap from one generation of technology to the next’.

Baker's article identifies the need for enterprises to undertake continuous strategy-making and to develop fresh business models. If VET organizations are to provide up-to-date training for such enterprises, they may need to up-date their own organizations, strategies and business models.