Yasmin King, CEO of SkillsIQ (pictured), writes below that we cannot settle for the minimum in aged care training. Read her full piece on the SkillsIQ website. CCA's upcoming National ACE Summit on 29 June will deal with these and related aged care training issues.
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“In the Certificate III in Individual Support Worker qualification, we see training providers who work closely with employers, packaging the qualification to deliver training in the skills that employers want and that employees need, and helping employers to support the 120 hours of work experience that the employees require to obtain the qualification. As a result, many of their students end up with jobs at the end…. Everyone wins, because the employer wants to continue working with the provider; the provider is able to advertise its success in supporting real employment outcomes; and the students are winners as they now have jobs they have been well trained to do.
“However, what we see much more of are the providers that do the minimum. They spend a fortune on advertising, incentives and web optimisation in order to get as many students as they can on the premise that there are “lots of jobs in this sector”. They then deliver a package made up of the most easily-delivered elective units combined with the core and delivered as cheaply as possible, often online. So the electives that were designed to give flexibility to industry (to be responsive to what individual employers need most) are instead packaged at the lowest possible cost to deliver, and are invariably not a cohesive mix. Couple this with a requirement for the poor student to go and source 120 hours of work experience off their own bat (sometimes having to actually pay for that experience) and it’s not hard to recognise that these are the same providers who are calling us and asking us to tell them what the minimum requirement is to get a ‘compliance tick’.
“Imagine if the leadership of these organisations instead did what good providers do and spent their money on quality delivery, working with employers and delivering great training outcomes instead of sales leads. We know it can be done because there are great examples of both public and private providers who do it. What we need to do is educate both learners and employers on what ‘good’ looks like, and that it’s not necessarily what’s on the side of a bus, or a train station billboard, or on your Facebook feed.
“We must demand a VET system that rewards more than just achieving the compliance minimum.”
- Yasmin King, SkillsIQ
