Training quality and return on investment

What drives your organisation’s training decisions? Is it the desire to deliver genuine outcomes such as increased skills and underpinning knowledge to realise performance advantages - or merely to furnish staff with a qualification?

If it’s the latter, the market is catered for by registered training organisations (RTOs) and non-registered providers offering quick-fix products in accordance with Australian Qualification Framework (AQF), in addition to non-accredited products. But will the outcome meet your organisation’s standards and performance criteria?

If you desire the former, you need to look beyond the qualification being issued by the trainer and investigate the detail around quality, depth and breadth of content being delivered. While an AQF outcome should ensure a minimum standard, the content and quality can and does vary from provider to provider. The question is sometimes asked: “Are today’s students trained under AQF better skilled than those graduated under the previous curriculum-based system?”

Prior to the AQF and RTO/TAFE colleges as we know them today, clients made value judgements about these issues based on the reputation of the university or technical college. Nothing has really changed. The AQF in itself does not make all providers equal nor qualification, content and quality identical. It is up to clients to ensure that the outcome (not just the qualification) suits their needs.

The resource boom has seen a number of training organisations offering skills-gap-plugging instrumentation qualifications in an attempt to meet demand. The instrumentation subjects in the Certificate IV in Electrical-Instrumentation ‘dual-trade’ program offered at RMIT University are delivered in 440 student contact hours (11 weeks full-time equivalent). Compare this to some of the truncated courses on offer and ask yourself the quality, depth, breadth and outcome/capability questions. Another angle to consider is that if it takes three years of trade school to train an instrument apprentice, how is it possible to turn out a similar quality graduate by sending an electrician to do a six-week instrument course, some of which may be gained by recognition of prior learning (RPL)? While RPL has to be made available under AQF rules, will such an outcome satisfy your organisation’s needs? Another way to consider this is whether you would prefer to fly with a pilot assessed as simply competent (perhaps by partial RPL), rather than the more rigorous proficiency and graded selection processes used by quality premium full-service carriers?

There is little in an electrician’s trade training that provides the knowledge necessary to work on instrumentation and yet this, plus an instrument short course, is what some clients accept on the basis of the qualification the student will be awarded. Do they actually understand the outcome when sending staff down this path?

Companies such as SAGE Didactic and Hirschmann address these quality issues by forming joint ventures with organisations like RMIT to deliver instrumentation and industrial ethernet training across Australia and New Zealand. Products include accredited and targeted non-accredited training to meet industry’s needs. Quality, however, is never compromised and ROI is canvassed at length with clients.

There is never a free lunch. Someone always pays, and in the end you get what you pay for. Before contracting for any training, conduct your own due diligence to ensure that ROI, expectations and outcomes are going to be met - and don’t think that all training organisations or like-qualifications are equal.