The NZ Qualifications Framework went live this week and there has been a magical decline in the number of quals from about 6,000 to about 5,000. Of course, this was an easy gain, because the quals still exist but they are now marked as expiring or discontinued – there were always going to be a large number of quals in the system that weren’t being used but were still counted. The hard work starts now to get the number down further.

What I’m more interested in is how people are finding the new NZQF website and, in particular, its search mechanism. I’ve put a few thoughts below.

• The design of the search function is very important because there is no obvious browse function.
• I searched for Engineering and Related Technologies Qualifications of all qualification types, at all levels, of all credits and that were current. The default search order is by qualification number. Since all provider qualifications have an alphabetic reference before the number, national qualifications appear first in the list. This design call obviously preferences national quals (but that’s the point of the reforms anyway), but there is a deeper level of preference – only 200 quals seem to appear in the list and you can’t access those from 201 onwards (of course, you could search under each subcategory and none of them seem to top 200 – from a quick look at obvious suspects).
• It is now much easier to see where quals are offered by a range of organisations (this especially applies to national quals). On another search under electrical engineering, you can see at the top of the list that 7 organisations offer an NCL5 and click through to them. That’s a good visual reference for people to see where there is broad support for quals,  although I suspect that very few people outside of the agency/TEO community will look at the NZQF database. The data should be shared with Career Services as well, but at the moment if you search under “electrical engineering” over there, you get quite a different list (or at least in a different format). I expect that integration is underway and it needs to be, because no-one except a quals geek is really going to go to the NZQF site.
• While there is a default search order, you can change the order of the list so that it is sorted by any variable. That’s a good feature.

Anyone have any other thoughts on the new website?  Should they add a countdown clock as the number of quals go down? Or maybe a trash heap with old quals?