About Qualifications
A question that is often raised at the Skills Council is around the creation of qualifications and the starting point for their development, which arrives first the qualification of the actual job role in industry.
For many there is a view that vocational qualifications are built, in a generic way, after which job roles in industry are aligned or mapped to the qualification.
In reality and in nearly all cases, the development of a vocational qualification actually starts in the workplace with an analysis of actual jobs that are being carried out. Analysis also occurs where changes in technology or work practice start to create new roles that have not been described in competency or qualification terms before.
So the creation of a qualification or a review of an existing qualification starts where the action is, in the workplace with an actual job role. Where issues can become complicated is where the Skills Council is asked to support the development of qualifications that appear at odds with what is actually happening in industry. This position is often promulgated on the basis that if an extremely broad qualification is built then lots of jobs can be covered through huge elective banks in the one qualification.
The major limitation with this approach is that little is achieved around the consistence of the qualification nationally, because everybody has a different bank of units in their qualification and employers can never really be sure what a person has been trained in because the bank of elective units is so broad.
In most cases common jobs in the workplace have common elements around their operation. There are also core functions of most jobs that employers employers agree are critical to the specific job role. For example there would be few transport operators that did not believe that OH&S, fatigue management and load restraint were not essential to the job role of a truck driver.
Ultimately it's what happens in the workplace that is the key to vocational qualification design and build processes.
Advice from the Skills Council is to avoid catch-all qualification structures and focus instead on developing qualifications that accurately reflect specific job roles but with capacity for units of competency to be used where the same job role may differ due to the size, nature and core function of the workplaces.