Wayne Smith, CEO of Tranzqual, responds to Dave Guerin’s Monday post on industry training.

Dave Guerin’s recent blog on ITOs hitting a rough patch is largely fair comment.

We all know that well over a decade ago the then government embarked on a journey to “get more people into tertiary education.”  That strategy was all about quantity and in an uncapped funding system fuelled by a buoyant economy the entire education system lapped up the resulting bums-on-seats taxpayer funded largesse.  There was a massive proliferation of qualifications, programs and new entities (not all with quality education as their primary focus I might add!).  Many sprang up in relatively short order like a desert blooming after rains.  Dave rightly points out some poor behaviour from both old and new players.

The unfortunate side effect of a strategy focussed on quantity was the commensurate decline in average quality across the system.  This is my first role in the Education system and frankly I was somewhat appalled at the quality of much of what I saw.  The relatively recent shift to a quality focus is very welcome and really came through for the first time in TEC’s 2007 Investment Round which had effect basically from 1 January 2008.  With the benefit of hindsight the country should have made this change about five years earlier.

It’s probably also fair to say that a reasonable chunk of resources in the governments two key monitoring agencies, NZQA and TEC, was being deployed through this period on managing the volume growth across the system.  Dave talks about the “sector’s maturation” and I think that also applies to NZQA and TEC in their monitoring role who are now coming of age in this area with a strong focus on issues of quality – a very good thing.

In respect to TEC I suspect there is little disagreement in principle from across ITOs around their recent sharper focus on performance including their intention to in effect publish league tables of ITO performance.  As National Training Standard Setting Bodies for vocational training I suspect that will lead in turn to ITOs making information available around the quality of training provision in the marketplace to better inform company managers - something our industries are hungry for.  That’s information a number of us already use in making decisions around which providers to partner with.

In practise TEC’s recent swag of operational policies are a mixed bag but that’s OK.  What’s pragmatic and works will come out in the wash soon enough.    Again Dave is right in that ITO policy has been overseen for too long by the same people that from a distance appear (and here I accept I may be doing them a disservice but it’s a valid perception) to be unable to think past an education system divided up like a pie simply along institutional lines.  In my view a modest (and I mean modest) chunk of Vote Education spend should help drive the country’s economic agenda somewhat more directly and better than it does now.

The role of industry in the Education System, and here I don’t mean ITOs, is currently poorly served in my view.  Education policy really needs the injection of someone who has a solid understanding of the corporate sector and what actually drives productivity and profitability within a company preferably having been there and done that themselves.  A couple of on the ground examples.  We all know the issue of completions and actual versus nominal program durations are hot at the moment.

At the vocational end of the spectrum from TEC’s perspective simply looking at completions across ITOs, ITPs, PTEs and Wananga makes for an easy comparison but in order to do a good monitoring job they may need to go down another layer. In a company a full qualification is at best a medium term human resource up skilling strategy and then at best an uncertain one as newly qualified people make themselves available to the job market.  There is no magic lift in either productivity or company profitability at the point of completion.  However modules of training that lead to a full qualification are more manageable within the company with each module (if well designed with genuine industry input) delivering a series of lifts in productivity.  Companies need the ability to blend that short term requirement with the medium term.

In respect to nominal versus actual duration the current economic climate makes this topical.  A program with a perfect nominal to actual duration match in late 2007 would almost certainly not have that match today as companies adjust their priorities including training to the economic conditions.  An industry specific example for us is some ports and stevedoring programs which require specific types of ships to be in port (and for the shipping schedules to be known) in order for trainees to be able to complete their training.  The timing of such training is completely unknown at the time of trainee signup and impossible to predict and factor into durations.

 Do TEC’s operational policies reflect these sorts of industry realities?  Not yet, they have started with a heavy focus on some of the problem areas Dave has quite rightly listed and while some will be due to poor behaviour I suspect others may well be due to the overall focus (or lack of) of the system prior to 2008.  I’m really interested in seeing the emergence of some solid analysis from TEC as to just how widespread and prevalent these issues are balanced with some views as to why.  Some of the data type issues he has bulleted for example may simply be a reflection of the tiny size of many ITOs operating with a heavy reliance on antiquated IT systems overcome by the volume growth outlined above.

That sort of balanced and well rounded picture is critical to the maturation of the sector and will be well supported I suspect by the vast bulk of ITOs and their Boards.