A Campus Review article published in August last notes that Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) is working to develop a National Skills Taxonomy (NST) to enable a more flexible and responsive skills system. I’m grateful to be able to promote and paraphrase the work of its author, Deb Carr.
JSA prepared a discussion paper on Australia’s proposed National Skills Taxonomy, and we highlighted this in a VDC News article earlier this year. Such taxonomies are nothing new, however, with versions being available in the UK and Europe, the US and Singapore.
As Deb’s Campus Review article points out:
“A comprehensive and accurate skills taxonomy lists skills that occupations require. It describes, classifies, and identifies skills like a dictionary.
It enables everyone to talk about skills using the same words: people looking for a job, or a better job, employers looking for employees or contractors, companies outsourcing work, freelancers marketing their skills, career development, and career changes.”
Moreover, a well-designed and maintained skills taxonomy should help identify cross-job (transversal) skills. “Thus, it promotes occupational mobility and lifelong learning.”
Finally, employers can use such a taxonomy “to audit their workforce’s skills, quickly match candidates to job openings, find internal candidates for projects, and identify skills gaps between a person and their dream job.”
Thus, as a taxonomy it is very much employment and job oriented.
Will the taxonomy help unite tertiary education in Australia?
The author suggests no. Her article maintains that “it makes no sense to place or maintain VET-HE articulation barriers but disagrees that a common skills language will lower these barriers.” Also, the NST should not be made like a curriculum as, in her view, this will restrict its potential utility to other stakeholders.
Her article suggests that “the rapid pace of workplace change is making it hard to keep qualifications current.” Some Jobs and Skills Councils (JSCs) offer promising solutions and “a well-designed and maintained NST could accelerate or in fact, distract from Training Package development.” Implementation, she suggests, is key. She also supports the NST and the former Australian Skills Classification (ASC), “but not to join-up the tertiary system.” A joined-up tertiary system is not a priority for any skills taxonomy, she suggests.
There are a range of reasons that VET-HE articulation is difficult, she points out. This is because:
“Students trying to maximise credits when transitioning from VET to higher education face institutional barriers with little agency and nil advocacy.”
And
“Institutional culture, esteem disparity, and financial disincentives are more significant barriers than language.”
This is true.
Another possible perspective, though
It is interesting to consider the work of the Qualification Reform Design Group. (We highlighted their paper a while ago in an article here.) Initially they proposed three purposes for VET qualifications, but I suspect this is not the end of their story and we will see some adjustment in their thinking in the next little while to expand the scope of the purposes or even add a new one or more.
In my view one of the key issues that might help better alignment of VET and HE (noting the tensions and barriers raised above) is the conception of competence and competency-based training.
There is a strong industry focus in VET’s policy thinking, but is this is – I think – being challenged, perhaps by a return to that which Kangan proposed in the mid 1970s. It is, in effect, better balancing the vocational and the personal. As the Kangan report noted, most people undertaking VET
“are commonly influenced by utilitarian motives. As a result, it is important that general education be seen as relevant to vocational purposes and that vocational education in turn becomes more general in its content and methods so that people can be better prepared to adapt themselves to changing conditions and to re-training, as necessary, at any time of their working lives.”
This rings true, I think, with emerging sector rhetoric. One of the key factors to consider, therefore, despite the impediments to a more joined up tertiary system, will be for Australian VET to broaden its conception of competence and the content and focus of Training Packages, and this may better align it with the way that higher education thinks. It may also better reflect the way in which VET’s providers think, as they try to balance meeting industry and employer needs with the more ‘personal’ development needs of their students by empowering them and their learning in the longer term.
