VDC News
VDC Final Edition
Special Edition Wednesday | 11 December 2024
Register Now – The VET AI Symposium…
The VET Development Centre is excited to bring to you ‘The VET AI Symposium’, to be held Tuesday 18 March, in-person at VDC in Melbourne and online nationally via Zoom. This leading event, themed “Harnessing AI for Transformative Vocational Education: Innovations, Strategies, and Future Directions,” aims to bring together industry leaders, educators, executives, and AI experts.
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Congratulations – Australian VET…
Dr Adam Bignold has won the Australian VET Teacher/Trainer of the Year Award held in Canberra on Friday 6 December.
The Australian Training Awards are the peak national awards that showcase best practice in vocational education and training (VET). The Awards recognise and celebrate excellence and are an important mechanism for promoting the benefits of VET.
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Victorian Skills First Workforce…
Plan ahead – applications close 11 February 2025
As part of the Victorian Workforce Development initiative targeting organisational capability, VDC has developed the Workforce Development Grant opportunity for operational innovation and workforce capability projects to selected providers that have a Victorian VET Skills First contract.
The 2025 VDC Workforce Development Grants aims to provide financial support to Victorian Skills First Providers to build workforce capability and development within the VET Sectors to support training providers in maintaining quality practices.
There are two project grants of $25,000 and six project grants of $15,000 available to Victorian successful applicants and to ensure the grants have the most impact across the sector, grants will be awarded across the following categories: $25,000 – One TAFE/Dual Sector $25,000 – One Private RTO $15,000 – Two TAFES (1x metro, 1x regional) $15,000 – Four Private RTOs/Learn Locals (2x metro, 2x regional).
Applicants are encouraged to focus on areas of organisational workforce capability with projects ranging from general teaching and learning practice, staff induction and ongoing support, the exploration of a key workforce issue, a feature of good practice or the needs of a particular practitioner or specialist group.
It is expected that successful projects will demonstrate measurable impacts and practical outcomes such as:
- Build skills and capability within the VET workforce
- Allow greater mobility and transference of knowledge and skills across the VET system
- Enhance the capacity of the organisation and the system as a whole
- Improved outcomes for learners
- High quality teaching and learning practice resources
- Strategies to sustain new and improved practices
- Commitment to ongoing teaching and learning initiative
APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN & CLOSE 5.00PM TUESDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2025
The Victorian Skills Authority funds the VDC to provide opportunities to the Victorian workforce at Skills First providers.
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New VDC webinar recordings on-demand…
The most in-demand VDC webinars from 2024 are now available for purchase as recordings through VDC Learn on our website. This is your chance to gain insights from top experts, revisit impactful sessions, or explore new topics – all at your own pace. When you purchase and complete a webinar recording, you’ll be eligible to receive a certificate of completion, boosting your currency and professional development plan.
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VDC Professional Learning Program for…
The 2025 VDC Professional Learning Program for Semester 1 is now live! Click here to explore the program and discover all the sessions available to you.
As a leader in professional development for the VET sector workforce, VDC is committed to providing high-quality, relevant programs that benefit not just VET educators and practitioners, but professionals across various fields. Best of all, there are no upfront membership fees to access VDC programs and services.
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Save the Date – VET National Teaching…
The VET Development Centre is thrilled to share that in response to high demand, the 2025 VET National Teaching & Learning Conference 2025 will take place in Melbourne on August 14th & 15th at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre.
VDC has a proud 20-year tradition of providing one of Australia’s leading teaching & learning conferences for Vocational Education and Training.
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November Edition
Edition 23 - 2024 | November 2024
So long and farewell: a reflection by…
On behalf of the Board and Team at VDC, I’d like to extend our thanks to the VDC News ghostwriter Hugh Guthrie for his invaluable contribution to this newsletter. It has been a privilege to have someone with Hugh’s reputation, experience and standing deliver ever consistent observations, opinions and insights into the VET research and policy settings around Australia and internationally over the past 7 years. I’d also like to thank Hugh for his passion and support for the endeavours of the VET Development Centre in providing quality and accessible professional learning for VET educators and practitioners.
Martin Powell, CEO VDC.
After having written articles for VDC News since early 2018, I’ve decided it’s time to put down the pen, or at least stop searching the internet and other information sources and let another take up the mantle of trying to tell you what’s going on in VET in Australia and internationally. I think seven years is enough for anyone, and I always believed that I should give up before I thought I had got too stale. After all, the number of articles I have written over the period totals about 550! The upside, though, is that doing this work has kept me in touch with the VET sector and what those within it, managing it and regulating or using it, are thinking.
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Emerging occupational roles in the…
This article highlights another new paper from the Jobs and Skill Australia (JSA), just published this month. Entitled ‘Emerging roles’ it seeks to “identify and showcase trends in the evolving Australian labour market. The paper also provides intelligence on market demand, skills composition required by employers, and other demographic characteristics to create a holistic picture of emerging roles.”
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VDC Professional Learning Program for…
The 2025 VDC Professional Learning Program for Semester 1 is now live! Click here to explore the program and discover all the sessions available to you.
As a leader in professional development for the VET sector workforce, VDC is committed to providing high-quality, relevant programs that benefit not just VET educators and practitioners, but professionals across various fields. Best of all, there are no upfront membership fees to access VDC programs and services.
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Reflecting on VET quality: One last…
One of the last pieces of VET work I am undertaking before I really retire is co-authored with my long-term colleague and ‘partner in crime’ Melinda Waters. It focuses on VET and conceptions of its quality. Watch out for when it is hopefully published sometime next year thorough NCVER’s VOCEDplus Research database because it will try to take a hard look on the identified landmark VET papers and reports, and the wide range of other work, which have addressed VET quality issues. Thus, as part of my ‘swansong’ for VDC News, I thought it was worth taking a quick look at issues related to the sector’s quality we will address in this paper.
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JSA releases paper reporting on strong…
JSA has just released its report: Strong and Responsive VET Pathways. As it notes, “this publication is the latest release from the VET National Data Asset (VNDA), established by Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) in partnership with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).”
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