After Dr Stephen Ziguras, Judy Bissland, Executive Director Educational Development and a 2000 Flexible Learning Leader at Swinburne spoke about "How Providers respond to industry needs".
Judy spoke about the need to respond both to the traditional labour market, as well as the transitional one that is emerging. Judy advised that VET still needs to serve the ‘heart of VET’ the traditional labour market, continuing to provide industry with skilled workers, and using the relative advantage of greater flexibility than the other educational sectors.
Tension between the student and industry demand, in addition to the lag in planning processes from state government agencies, requires that VET do their own planning and investigation. VET may be pushed into delivery in areas where staff may not be available, and they cannot offer security to staff. In the field of New Apprenticeships highly flexible delivery models are needed, but flexibility is not enough – they must also be high quality. To encourage entry into areas of skills shortages, VET needs to work together with industry, schools, careers advisors and so on to address the shortfalls.
The transitional labour market needs a different response; VET needs to respond to change from industrial economy to knowledge economy. We also need to focus on emerging skills needs as identified through research from VET sector. Industry needs staff that can learn new skills and adapt. Swinburne has been focussing on generic skills and innovation skills; some of the biggest challenges are in providing appropriate professional development for staff. This is something I would like to follow up in more detail in a second trip to Melbourne.