Another article in this issue highlights a VET Workforce Study by Jobs and Skills Australia. This article is concerned with the VET Workforce Blueprint, which forms a significant part of the moves to promote VET quality reforms to support, grow and sustain the VET workforce. (There is an At a glance version of the Blueprint that you can access here.)
The Blueprint aims to identify actions for workforce attraction, retention, development, and career progression. It identifies a range of 8 opportunities and 14 associated actions.
The opportunities and associated actions
Opportunity 1: Building a better understanding of the VET workforce
Potential actions include, first, undertaking comprehensive occupational mapping for the VET workforce to identify and inform broader actions to strengthen pathways into, and through, the VET workforce. A second potential action is developing a VET workforce data strategy to enable the collection of VET workforce data to support and enable informed policy and workforce strategies, and inform ongoing research or – thirdly – establishing an ongoing research program to develop a robust evidence base for key workforce issues.
Opportunity 2: Attracting people into the VET workforce, particularly teachers, trainers and assessors
Five actions are suggested including (1) developing targeted, coordinated and sequenced promotion strategies and activities to boost the profile of VET workforce careers and attract more people into the sector, (2) increasing industry involvement in employer and RTO led responses, and encouraging and facilitating industry led responses, to VET workforce challenges, (3) developing localised and bespoke First Nations strategies to build the First Nations VET workforce. These will be developed from the ground up in partnership with First Nations peoples. (4) This action will involve identifying critical actions through the development of a 10-year National Foundation Skills Strategy to strengthen the foundation skills sector and consider opportunities to grow and support the foundation skills workforce. Finally (5), through the development of a National VET for Secondary Students Strategy, exploring opportunities to grow and support the teacher, trainer and assessor workforce delivering VET.
Opportunity 3: Making it easier for high-quality teachers, trainers and assessors to enter and stay in the VET workforce
This can be achieved by investing in innovative VET workforce pathways through scaling up existing initiatives and/or piloting new models which contribute to an uplift in workforce capacity or capability and developing initiatives to attract people into, and support and retain people in, VET workforce careers.
Opportunity 4: Supporting professional learning, career progression and industry currency
This can be done by implementing “targeted professional learning to address key industry and pedagogical priorities, including embedding best practice in inclusivity, respect and gender issues into training delivery and VET workforce culture.”
Opportunity 5: Providing more support for early career teachers, trainers and assessors
This can be achieved by monitoring and evaluating “the impact of the Training and Education (TAE) Training Package to ensure it supports teachers, trainers and assessors in the VET workforce, and promote the undertaking of higher-level qualifications to provide opportunities for ongoing practitioner development.”
Opportunity 6: Developing and resourcing staff to support learners with diverse and complex needs
“This opportunity will be realised through a collection of actions that will support the VET workforce to better support different learner cohorts through targeted, context-specific actions.”
Opportunity 7: Reducing administrative and compliance burden
This can be achieved by undertaking work “to map and analyse compliance and administrative burden and implement strategies to reduce this burden, where appropriate, for the VET workforce.”
Opportunity 8: Supporting TAFEs at the heart of the VET sector
This can be done by embedding “TAFE workforce leadership as a key activity of the National TAFE Network.”
