Skilling for the future

Speaking at this year’s TAFE Directors Australia conference, I cautioned that one of the policy reforms recommended in the final report of the House Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training’s inquiry into the Perceptions and Status of VET could pose problems for TAFE even while superficially it might seem beneficial.

The recommendation I was referring to was Recommendation 26:

“The Committee recommends that the Australian Government work with State and Territory Governments to explore options to separate vocational education and training (VET) into ‘education’ and ‘training’, including funding and governance arrangements to support high-performing independent providers to deliver shorter and industry-specific courses and to prioritise the delivery of longer courses and qualifications through technical and further education (TAFE) institutes.”

This recommendation had bi-partisan support in the Committee’s final report – and while there was no mention of it in the Communiqué from the latest meeting of Commonwealth, State and Territory Skills Ministers – there was an announcement this week which suggests to me that the sector could be quickly moving in this direction even without the formal involvement of Ministers.

Future Skills Organisation, the Jobs and Skills Council for the Business, ICT and Finance sectors has just announced the membership of its RTO Taskforce which will help guide the FSO on “ways to transform and fast-track training delivery”.

The membership comprises 16 representatives:

• 13 members from 9 TAFE Institutes
• 2 from community colleges, and
• 1 from a university-owned RTO.

Before I explain why I have concerns about the make-up of this RTO Taskforce for both TAFE Institutes and private providers (for the first time in a longtime the community sector is well represented), I want to be extremely clear that my comments are NOT a criticism of any of the individuals selected to be a member of the Taskforce. I know a number of them personally and others by reputation and they will make a great contribution to the FSO’s work.

The problem is this:

• private providers deliver a lot of training in these industry areas (especially Business Services)
• most of it is not funded by government but instead by individuals and businesses, and
• therefore their training has to be current and relevant for the private provider to stay in business.

Already many private providers working with the IT sector and with businesses looking for IT training have moved training away from the ICT Training Package and into industry accredited offerings… because the ICT Training Package is losing relevance as technology changes more quickly than our national Training Package development processes, designed nearly 30 years ago, can accommodate.

You may wonder, if governments are focussing 70% of their funding on the TAFE sector and private providers (at least in ICT) are already moving out of the formal accredited VET space – why does the unbalanced composition of the FSO RTO Taskforce matter for private providers and TAFE Institutes?

The FSO Training Packages were last updated on the following dates with the following changes:

• Business Services (November 2021, released in January 2022) to include a new qualification, 11 new units and 5 skill sets were introduced, and minor updates were made to 7 qualifications and 7 other units.
• Financial Services (April 2022, released in June 2022) 20 qualifications were updated, 1 new unit and 2 skill sets were introduced, and 78 units and 13 skill sets were updated, 18 units and 2 skill sets were deleted.
• ICT (November 2021, released in February 2022) to include 33 new units, update 27 units, include 48 new skill sets, update 26 skill sets, delete 4 skill sets and make minor changes to 10 qualifications and 4 units.

This was a large amount of work, as all Training Package changes are, undertaken by the former Skills Service Organisation and the relevant Industry Reference Committees.

And then of course in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public.

Research commissioned by the FSO indicates that the work tasks articulated in the units and qualifications in their Training Packages (along with the Creative Arts Training Package) have the greatest AI exposure.

76% of VET qualifications with above average exposure are in the Business, Finance and ICT Training Packages.

By the FSO’s own research there will need to be changes made to many of the units in these Training Packages.

This is despite the naïve views of some in the sector who assume that GenAI is “just another type of software and the units (of competency) are all non-specific enough now” that GenAI “won’t mean many changes” as I heard one official claim recently.

So as the FSO and the broader VET sector grapples with what changes to make to these Training Packages – it seems surprising that the specialist private providers who are doing the most fee-for-service delivery, working most closely with employers (including on industry-accredited training because the relevant VET qualifications and units are too out-of-date) have been excluded from contributing at the highest level to the changes needed to these Training Packages…?

And for the TAFE representatives – while they will clearly welcome being so heavily involved – I wonder if they will look back in time and wonder if these discussions helped position them to nurture and grow their fee-for-service delivery (which has fallen enormously in recent years) or if it kept them stuck in consultations trying to make an outdated model of qualification development work in a period of profound workforce and educational change?

And what will that mean in turn for TAFE graduates who may choose a Fee-Free qualification because they can’t afford one of the specialist fee-for-service industry accredited alternatives, and then subsequently find their IT skills and knowledge are already years out-of-date… not because of anything their TAFE teachers did wrong, but because the 30 year old national Training Package consultation process failed to keep the content they were learning current?

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I approached the FSO before publishing this article and they advised that:

“all types of training providers must be able to shape our work. The FSO has established several forums for doing this either through participation in our Strategic Advisory Committee and Taskforces or on our task focused Technical Committees, which are bespoke groups of subject matter experts formed to support detailed activities such as Training Package Development. We will continue to adapt these forums as we develop as a JSC. Specifically, the ‘RTO Taskforce’ will be developed to ensure there are more private training providers involved.”

The FSO also encouraged people to contact them if they would like to learn more.