Edition 45, June 2007

Innovative workplace training partnership in the disability industry

Low unemployment and labour shortages are forcing business and industry to undertake radical shifts in their recruitment and training strategies to ensure they are able to maintain a strong and skilled workforce.

For many businesses and industries these new strategies are built around restructuring and rethinking their relationship with their local registered training organisations.

With only 4.4 per cent unemployment in Western Australia and a booming economy, the disability services provider, Nulsen Haven Association, has had to come up with innovative recruitment and retention practices to meet growing demand for its services.

At the beginning of the decade Nulsen Haven was able to pick and choose disability service graduates coming out of local registered training organisations. Now they are faced with the dual dilemma of a reducing pool of graduates and the threat of losing workers to more lucrative industries.

According to Nulsen Haven Human Resources Co-ordinator, Scott Thomas, the initial result meant the association needed to strengthen their internal induction training program as it employed more untrained people to fill positions. However, that would not be enough.

'Our internal training provides solid grounding for work in the caring industry, however for staff who wished to obtain formal training had to forego that opportunity unless they stopped work. For us this meant risking the loss of good staff who sought formal grounding in their career,' Mr Thomas says.

Nulsen Haven is one of the five largest disability service providers in Western Australia, specialising in services for people with moderate to severe and profound intellectual and physical disabilities. Over the last five years the demand for its services has grown up to 13% per annum. In turn this has spurred on greater demand for staff.

'Demand for our services required a minium of 15 new staff every six weeks. On average we're only getting between six and eight starters. To transform this, we identified the need to strengthen our employer brand and to make a greater difference to our existing staff', Mr Thomas says. 'We responded to this in February 2006, by embarking on a free education program for new and existing staff.'

As a not for profit organisation which operates on a 24 hour roster, Nulsen Haven also needed to ensure the program design operated with minimal cost and disruption to the workplace. The strategy had to be flexible enough to provide on-the-job training and minimal 'outside-of-work' requirements to suit the needs of their employees.

The solution was to provide nationally accredited and financially funded traineeships. In structuring this, Nulsen Haven screened a number of training providers and selected one that focused on providing business solutions.

'Quality training is important, but the reality is that quality is an added value. We needed a training provider who desired to make a difference to an employer's core needs and two of these needs are recruitment and retention methodology,' Mr Thomas says.

Nulsen Haven selected the Perth-based Central TAFE because this took an interest in how they could provide business solutions to the company. 

The result was the establishment of a 12 or 24 month traineeship program based around the Certificate III and IV (for existing staff) in Disability Work traineeships already offered by Central TAFE. By registering workers as trainees Nulsen Haven was able to access Commonwealth Government incentives.

The program was structured  to deliver mutual benefits to both. A suitably qualified Nulsen Haven employee was seconded to Central TAFE as a workplace trainer/assessor, who worked exclusively with Nulsen Haven. Workers were registered as TAFE profile students which reduced the cost of training and enabled trainees to be paid at full wages for work and classroom training.

By working with Central TAFE, Nulsen Haven was able minimise its commitment of resources and deliver training at low or neutral cost. The partnership meant that Nulsen Haven was able to effectively operate as a registered training organisation without the administrative burdens.

A key benefit of the partnership in the initial stages was the ability to have dual logo advertising for the traineeship program which allowed both organisations to tap into each others different markets.

Forty six traineeships were established with 18 New Start and 28 Existing Worker Traineeships.

'What was exciting was that at our launch we employed 40 new staff. This met the need for the opening of two new operations the next month,' Mr Thomas added.

Once the trainees were selected Central TAFE was able to go about structuring the program to meet the needs of the association and its employees. Central TAFE analysed the training already provided and ascertained that there was a need to conduct a monthly three hour workshop at Nulsen Haven to address essential and underpinning knowledge.

Along with the workshops, a Central TAFE trainer and/or assessor made a monthly visit to each trainee. Central TAFE also incorporated skills recognition including recognition of prior learning into the program.

Central TAFE's Principal Lecturer in the Education and Community Services Portfolio, David Rogers, said there were numerous challenges to overcome to make the program a success.

'First and foremost we needed to provide training and assessment totally in the workplace. As part of that we needed to create holistic assessments,' Mr Rogers says.

'We also needed to embed Central TAFE staff in the Nulsen Haven office. We needed to challenge our trainers to change their mindset from classroom training to workplace training.

'This required selecting trainers and assessors who could operate effectively in the workplace. They needed to have thorough knowledge of, and experience in, the support worker role being delivered.

The trainees were doing the job on a daily basis so it was important that the trainer was trusted and could draw on practical experience.'

The sources of evidence used to assess the trainees included direct observation, workplace activities, supplementary questions, co-ordinator feedback, recent performance appraisals and other accredited training delivered by Nulsen Haven.

According to Mr Rogers, the move from the classroom to the workplace was a difficult task which required significant adjustment especially in the area of designing holistic workplace assessments.

'At the outset we found that coming from a classroom environment, we had too many assessments. We relied too much on paper based assessments. We realised that workplace assessment is easier to validate so we set about designing holistic assessments.

'At the start we didn't worry about the training package requirements and looked at what the workers were expected to do. From that we identified major tasks. We then carried out a detailed analysis of each task and then mapped the tasks back to the training package and specific elements within units of competence.

'When delivering this program for full-time students at TAFE we had 32 assessments for 14 units of competency. We were able to reduce that down to four or five major tasks which assessed a whole range of units.'

This article originally appeared in Training Packages @ Work

 

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