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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What strategies have helped the Institute become high-performing?

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

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

How did you address these gaps?

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

What are the critical success factors for organisational improvement?

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

Is there one key to high-performance?

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

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

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

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

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

Potential benefits of communities of practice include the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges for VET change agents include:

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

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

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

Does Challenger aspire to high-performance?

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

Is Challenger future-oriented?

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

What are the leadership principles within Challenger?

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

Is leadership at Challenger a team effort?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Service Skills, challenges for service industries include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does innovation start in your institute?

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

How do you involve your clients in innovation?

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

Do you have a planned, systematic approach to innovation?

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

How do you sustain innovations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the features of your work-integrated approach?

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

What is the design-engineering paradigm?

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

Do RMIT staff support work-integrated learning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jones finds that characteristics of VET professionals are as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growth strategies that RTOs like MEGT use include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Features of the restructure include:

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

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

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

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

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

Compare these with the historical TAFE attitudes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips for delivering nationally include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elements of personalised learning include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some guidelines for outsourcing are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.