Co-founder retires... again
Dairy Women's Network (DWN) needs to keep working closely with partners such as DairyNZ, Agri Womens Development Trust, beef farmers and AgITO, says its retiring trustee, Hilary Webber.
Along the way the original concept, whereby the skills and knowledge contained in a specific qualification’s components would be clear to everyone, including employers, has become blurred.
While most of the components of training are still guided by the wording of NZQA approved unit standards, the individual quirks of human nature and the complexities of funding have caused the number of different qualifications to balloon out to about 170 certificates and diplomas just for agriculture.
About 85 are supervised by the AgITO, and cover such diverse groupings as wool, pastoral (a huge collection), rural servicing, rural resale, water, equine and a clump covering pork, poultry and apiculture. The rest are usually referred to as ‘local qualifications’, taught by private providers, polytechnics and offshoots of the major industry components.
And it’s not just happened in agriculture. Last year the Minister of Tertiary Education ordered a full review of qualifications by industry/sector to ensure the correct alignment of training and education to industry needs and expectations. As usual they have given it a mnemonic - TRoQ.
As things have moved on in education ideas, the view these days is not just to have everything aimed at specific unit standard outputs, but to ‘contextualise’ learning at higher levels for more ‘real life’ outcomes.
The working parties (six alone for agriculture) were finalised in January, to come up with a full report by the end of May.
Things, as usual,
have stretched a bit and it’s now mid-August, but John Troutbeck of DairyNZ, chairing the pastoral group which includes all pastoral farming, explained the considerable work done so far.
“We began with a process of consultation which included significant input from the relevant pastoral industries and from a number of training organisations. Based on this, a draft qualification map was produced. This went out to a number of organisations representing the wider pastoral sector for comment. We have now collated the feedback and are pulling together a revised qual-map in consultation with NZQA and industry.
“Once the final map is done, we’ll be looking at the specific content, to be accompanied by a more defined ‘graduate profile’ which will specify what those achieving the qualification will be able to do, will know and what they will be capable of being.”
This will give employers a much clearer view of how qualifications will relate to employee capabilities, during training and on recruitment.
The new qualifications will change their names from ‘national certificate/diploma’ to ‘New Zealand certificate/diploma’. Individual training organisations may be able to adjust their programmes to suit regional, etc, differences, but graduate outcomes must be the same.
Current completion for TRoQ is May 31, 2014.
