Changing the Private and Institutional RTO Mindset!

I am constantly amazed by the poor offering provided to business enterprises by the majority of private and Institutional RTO's. Time and time again I see these RTOs offering training that is primarily classroom-based learning together with something they call “workplace training or workplace coaching” that is not workplace-based at all, but where the employee leaves the floor of the workplace to work one-on-one with the coach “assessor” usually on a written assessment of a unit of competency.

Perhaps these RTO’s don’t understand enterprise learning best practice?   Or they don’t want to align their training to enterprise learning practices?  Or maybe it’s that they don’t understand their customer’s needs for learning in an enterprise-based model?

But I think it may be a combination of all three, brought on by a loss of skill sets to interpret the learning needs of business enterprises.

However, this is good for my business as I have many enterprise business clients that contract my company to re-align their current and future training to enterprise learning best practice and then work with the RTO to ensure the enterprise’s needs are met. For an explanation of Enterprise-Based Learning please see my previous blog post “The Enterprise Learning Model”.

I was recently speaking with an energy retailer, who had signed off on a new training program for their call centre customer service agents based on the Certificate III in Customer Contact. This organisation wanted a workplace skills-based program but what they got was essentially an off-the-job training program and a rehash of their old program with a little bit of tinkering at the edges of sales and customer service training.

But I'm afraid that this organisation is going to be just as disappointed with this new program as it was with its old program, because nothing has changed as it’s a training program to complete a qualification rather than to enhance the functional job role of employees. A typical example within this “new” training program was a section on personal effectiveness that utilised Stephen Covey’s time management matrix and quadrant descriptors. The only problem was that in the process of writing it into their training materials, Covey's quadrant matrix was converted into a Cartesian coordinate system! That's right; someone had applied a low-high scale of importance and a low-high scale of urgency on an x-y axis, turning the whole quadrant matrix into nonsense.

But that wasn't the worst of it; for the previous two years this RTO's trainers had been facilitating this nonsense to the organisation's employees and not one trainer had noticed the error. And even if that wasn't substandard enough, when the error was brought to the attention of the RTO their stock answer was that their client had signed off on the program; apparently it was better to go with an error after training in it for two years than to admit a mistake and correct it!

Is it any wonder that business enterprises have become disillusioned with the ability of the majority of RTO's to offer enterprise-based learning practices that support the functional job roles of employees? That is, training that is provided as skills-based delivered within the workplace in a formative learning methodology. Where learning is a continuous process that happens on-the-job and assessment is actual workplace performance at the required level.

I think the main problem is that many RTO’s have lost the skills and ability to conduct an enterprise-based TNA (training needs analysis) and then translate this information into functional job role complex skill sets, map these skill sets to competencies, but then design learning materials and programs to the skill sets not the competencies. Thus providing training to the needs of the employer’s functional job roles rather than training just for a qualification.

The Stephen R Covey Time Management Matrix on YouTube: What Stephen R. Covey Taught Me About Time Management
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODyG5lKbH08