In 2016, a government strategy for doing business in India suggested, “Australia's vocational system is highly regarded in India and providers can benefit from this reputation if they can adjust their business model to reflect India's low-cost, high-volume environment.”
They couldn’t, but as Brigid Freeman and Nidhi S. Sabharwal explain, there is much more than money involved – Australian trainers aren’t selling what Indians want to buy. The authors also note that the Commonwealth does not report VET enrolments in India as a separate category. There may be a reason for that – there were just 200 of them in 2019.
In a new paper funded by the Australian Department of Education, they explain why, from the Feds down, we offer India what we think they need, rather than what Indians know has always worked for them.
For a start, the logic that underpins Australia’s commercial approach is quite different to the models used by the UK, Germany and Japan, Switzerland and Singapore, which are about “durability and institutional anchorage,” rather than mass-enrolments.
“Sustained foreign presence in India is consistently underwritten by foreign-government investment or industry-led coordination,” they write. And while Freeman and Sabharwal acknowledge the complexity of bureaucracy, they also point out that Australian’s training model does not synch with the way India works.
The structure of employment conditions also sets demand, they explain, “with informality in India’s workforce estimated at close to 90%, circumstances under which price sensitivity and non-formal learning pathways predominate.”
Australians offering a model made in Australia for Australians struggle against locals, with the “deep institutional embedding and contextual understanding of socioeconomic conditions to deliver locally aligned training to the domestic market.”
Certainly there are opportunities, to provide training for businesses working in industries where Australia has a recognised competitive advantage – for example in mining, forensic expertise, and tourism as ‘niche areas’ where Australian competitive advantage was recognised
While Freeman and Sabharwal do not state it, overall the AQF and apprenticeships do not cut it.
As to whether Australian universities offer a better fit, we are about to find out.