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.