How Vocational Training Is Responding to a Changing Job Market

The job market today looks significantly different from how it did just ten or fifteen years ago. Industries have changed, new roles have emerged, and in almost every sector, the kinds of skills that are needed from workers have changed too.

Vocational training, unsurprisingly, is right in the middle of all of this, and the pressure that many registered training organisations feel to stay up-to-date and relevant is significant.

The good news is that many vocational training providers are responding well to these challenges. The following outlines some of the ways in which vocational education is changing, and why many of those changes are for the better.

When Course Content Falls Behind Industry Reality

One of the oldest criticisms of vocational training is also one of the most fair: that course content is often out of date compared with current industry reality.

While training packages do get updated from time to time, by the time an updated qualification course makes its way through the system, the industry has often changed again.

Vocational training providers who are serious about delivering courses that are relevant and up-to-date therefore tend to do more. Many will actively seek employer feedback on course content and make great efforts to have regular conversations with the businesses they work with. They try to find out where the gaps are between what a course offers and what the job actually requires.

There's little that official training packages can do about this quickly, but what a training organisation can do is use industry feedback to adapt the way courses are delivered in the meantime.

This is where the operational side of running a training organisation becomes important. Providers looking into software for registered training organisations will find that purpose-built platforms are increasingly being used to manage exactly this kind of organisational knowledge — course delivery information, learner progress, trainer currency — rather than relying on systems that depend too heavily on one or two people holding all the relevant details in their heads.

When an organisation picks up new feedback from industry about how a course needs to shift, that information needs to be accessible to the people who can actually act on it. Good systems make that possible. Without them, useful feedback tends to sit with whoever received it and not go much further.

New Roles, New Demands

The growth of new industries means new qualifications are emerging, and existing industries are using more technology than they used to. Vocational training providers have new ground to cover.

In some cases, it can be done with micro-credentials and short course offerings. In others, it can be done by integrating technology components into existing programs. Either way, training organisations are finding ways to keep up with shifting demands from industry.

Flexible Delivery and Who It's For

The profile of the vocational learner is changing. Training providers are seeing more adults who are mid-career and more people returning to the workforce after some time away from it.

In response, delivery models have become more flexible. Online and blended learning options have expanded considerably, and there's a growing recognition that vocational qualifications need to be accessible to a wide range of people, not just school leavers going straight into an apprenticeship.

Face-to-face training remains central to most vocational qualifications, but the way learners access theory components and manage study around work and other commitments has become much more accommodating than it once was.

What Employers Are Noticing

Employers who work closely with training providers are reporting positive outcomes from recent graduates. Vocationally trained workers seem to require less hand-holding in the early stages of employment. They're more familiar with workplace conditions and better prepared for the unexpected.

Results like these suggest there's real value in vocational training remaining closely connected to industry standards. The providers maintaining those connections tend to produce graduates that employers actually want to hire again.

Staying Relevant Over the Long Term                                  

Vocational training needs to be well managed if it is to maintain this level of relevance over the long term.

Providers need to keep their relationships with industry active, their training delivery current with workplace practice, and their operations organised well enough to support quality training rather than getting in the way of it.

There's nothing complicated about those goals in principle. In practice, it takes real commitment to get them right and to keep them right as things around it keep shifting.