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

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

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

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

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

Challenges for VET change agents include:

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

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