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.