Peak workforce planner Jobs and Skills Australia suggests a ten year process to create one post-school system with VET and HE sectors.
Commissioner Barney Glover and JSA Special Advisor Peter Dawkins set out how to do it, in a briefing paper for JS’s recent Better Together report.
And now, new advice for the Training Minister’s Ministerial Council sets out why the VET sector needs to cross the gap between training and HE.
“Without reform, the vocational education and training system risks further losing market share to the higher education sector, which is increasingly the choice of prospective students,” the Qualification Reform Design Group warns. It states there are now, “too many qualifications and units which dilute the effectiveness of VET” and, ‘the priority is to prepare graduates with adaptable skills for both work and lifelong learning … rather than training solely for specific roles.”
This is necessary across workforce skill levels, because routine work across the economy is automating, creating needs for cognitive skills in VET trained workers. The Group nominates health care and social assistance as expanding employers where manual and cognitive work is not routine.
The group proposes a system transformation to fix four fundamentals:
- less training for narrow tasks and more knowledge bases so workers “can apply their skills to new and changing contexts
- an end to a universal qualification models, except for industries that require them
- fewer qualifications, “reducing overspecification … enabling common elements to be consolidated
- less centralised control of qualifications so learners can use skills and knowledge as industry demands
The primary purpose of the report is to create a coherent and credible path to transform the existing voced system from one designed in and for the ‘90s, at best, to a world where VET skills require intellectual above manual dexterity and where the distinction between what is training and what is education diminishes if not dissolves.
“Through such flexibility, learners can transition between qualifications and industries more easily, building upon their existing knowledge and skills rather than duplicating prior learning,” they write.
In October, Glover and Dawkins suggested ten elements to harmonise the tertiary system including;
- VET and HE move towards “common language about skills and knowledge
- consistent approach to recognised prior learning and credit recognition
- governance, regulation and legislative frameworks that improve tertiary ed operation
- qualification design and flexibility of delivery
Both are less about eating universities lunch, as creating a single post-school smorgasbord.
The question is, how to implement such a transformation of the present systems, which have hundreds of skill sets,1000+ qualifications and more than ten times that of competencies. Plus convincing everybody involved to change.
As voced commentator Phill Bevan puts it, “the reform’s vision for flexibility and adaptability will undermine the structured pathways currently provided by existing frameworks, leaving students uncertain about career outcomes and employers unsure what graduates are actually skilled for.”
