Different Ways of Working
Workplace Practice is not about shifting the classroom off the campus and into the workplace. Indeed, it seems that some modern workplace practitioners are evolving very different forms of practice from their cousins back on campus. Today as a TAFE ‘workplace practitioner’, it’s quite plausible that you may rarely ‘stand and deliver’ like the traditional classroom based teacher does. Out in the workplace, there’s a new pedagogy emerging, new way of being and seeing the job.
Major Points Summary
- Modern workplace practitioners are evolving a very different forms of practice. Out in the workplace, there’s a new pedagogy emerging, new way of being and seeing the job.
- About two hundred company employees and systems were mapped to the Training Package.
- With that investigative work done, Janine could make some sound professional judgments to identify the organizational standards.
- For Janine, when it comes to ‘collective recognition’ her professional judgment of the quality of the organization matters.
- To Gap Train, she wrote up work-based assignments where the elements of various modules appeared.
- In consultation with the faculty director she designed a learning system that involved two tools - manuals and work books.
- Janine didn’t have classes, but once a week she would go over to the workplace for two hours and sit in their training room. They all knew I would be there, an email would go out remind them.
- She delegated training to in-house colleagues and supervisors. She expected them to learn from each other.
- She worked more like a monitor or ‘project manager’ than a teacher.
At South Western Sydney Institute, ‘Tourism & Hospitality fulltime workplace practitioner’ Janine Loves doesn’t spend much of her day in front of a whiteboard.
Mapping Competency
Says Janine: “At the beginning, the company’s HR Manager was wanting to get a snapshot of her employees, of where they sat in terms of qualifications. So we mapped about two hundred employees to Certificate II. With the mapping and looking at their systems, their manuals, their procedures, their job descriptions, their in-house training and the training that they brought in, we could actually look at their employees and say … if they enrol in Cert II, this group of employees will actually get the whole certificate. On the other hand, this group over here would only need this many more subjects, while that other group over there would actually come close to getting Certificate III level through recognition”.
Mapping the company systems to the training package was definitely a huge preliminary job, but says Janine: “I learnt a lot, the staff learnt a lot, the HR Co-ordinator actually updated all their files – it became an exercise for the club to really tidy up their whole system”.
Mapping the personnel profiles provided the company with rich data too: “What they found was, they had a really fragmented situation. One of them had a Commerce Degree, somebody else had a Diploma of Hospitality Management, some had part diploma, while for others all they had was experience but lots of it with no formal qualifications… She decided that what she’d like to see was that from Duty Manager right through, everybody with a TAFE Diploma.”
Collective Recognition
But even when she’d completed the mapping job, Janine didn’t end up at the front of a classroom. Instead, the recognition phase began. “The students got a little bit involved but my work in this phase was more with the HR Manager and the HR Co-ordinator. They did a lot of the digging for me. I was saying ‘Okay, I need job descriptions’ …”. Janine sat in on their induction processes, she looked at their manuals and she mapped the manuals, the processes and the procedures across some of the modules. She used her professional judgment to identify the organizational standards. Instead of looking at fifteen people pulling beer, she picked some at random and judged that “a job description for bar attendant at this club means this standard. To be at this club, they had to be up to that level. They wouldn’t have made it though probation otherwise”. And then Janine had the club supervisors verify those judgments in writing for each individual.
With that investigative work done, Janine could then say “some of the early basic modules that we teach in our TAFE hospitality courses were exceeded in their in-house training.” For those particular units, that allowed her to give them ‘across the board recognition’ as a group.
For Janine, when it comes to this type of recognition process, her professional judgment of the quality of the organization matters. “The job descriptions were very well written and it was quite clear that what was on the job description matched the job role. That made it easy”. Janine warns: “In little clubs where the job descriptions are non existent or if you had a manager who was trying to push everyone through and they’re saying ‘yes, yes’ they can do this, they can do that, when they really can’t, then this type of process would not work. The quality of the HR department is part of why this model worked”.
Gap Training like a Project Manager
With recognition done, it was time for ‘gap training’ but even that involved an evolved pedagogy that was not ‘stand & deliver’ teaching. Instead, she wrote up work-based assignments where the elements of various modules appeared. Janine designed a learning process that involved two learning tools - manuals and work books. Having read the manual and understood the material, the workbook assignment is the application.
She didn’t have classes as such, but once a week she would go over to the workplace for two hours and sit in their training room. They all knew I would be there, an email would go out remind them.
“I would sit there and process a lot of this RPL. It was an opportunity for them to come and see me and if I needed to see someone I would actually contact them in advance and say ‘are you around on that day’?” Some people would literally put their head in the door and say ‘am I going okay?’ or can you please help me with my assignment?” Others would use email or ring her, “So there were all these choices and some people rarely physically made contact with me”.
There was an assignment on ‘work rosters’ and if someone came for help Janine might say: “Well you know who the expert in your group is ‘on rosters’, it’s such and such, yeah and I know he’s really happy to assist, maybe you should contact him”. They actually started to form bigger groups and in the end the whole group was emailing and bantering and they created a real sense of team.
She worked more like a monitor or ‘project manager’: “I had a spreadsheet. Some people had only two manuals to do, so they just did them straight away. Some people were a bit tardy”. With much of the assignment work they worked as a team. She expected them to learn from each other but when they did group work they were required to acknowledge their sources. Sometimes shift work made it difficult for a student worker to complete an assignment within the deadline, so extensions were negotiable but the student always had to send a courtesy copy to the HR manager. On other occasions the HR manager would contact Janine and say: “You may get an email from Jason because …he has ten days of non-stop shifts … if he requests an extension I stand right behind him”. There was a lot of that type of communication. “It wasn’t intended that the HR manager was the big stick, but she would email me and say two days after the assignments were due – ‘Have they all come in?’ and I would say ‘All except X’. All along it was two people”.
A Typical Week for this Workplace Practitioner
Janine now works at several workplaces to make up her fulltime load. Says Janine: “There’s no such thing as a typical week. In one week I could be out nearly the whole week, while another I’ll be out hardly at all”. Most of her time is spent liaising with people at workplaces, designing and then assessing assignments, mentoring or doing admin.
Typically a workplace visit would be one of two main things:
- Catching-up with the workplace HR Manager about where students are up to or to gather more information for recognition.
- Checking in with one or a group of students regarding assignments or to deliver some training where they want more information, or to discuss their recognition process.
Janine explains that the nature of student contact is changing: “It’s a mix - it’s email, phone calls, occasionally some need to drop into the college. Currently we’re trialing SMS Telstra Online. With that you’ve got an account and you can actually build a mailing list in the computer. The idea is if I want to SMS five people at the club to say ‘I’m going to be in on Monday’, it’ll do that type of thing. I’ve got a nice record for the rollbook too. I can also email an assignment or SMS to tell them that an assignment is with the HR Manager. A lot of them are very good now, they’ll put something up on their noticeboards for the whole team”.
Even returning assignments is a bit different to normal. Some of the clubs are happy to have them dropped off at HR, but generally Janine prefers to give them to the individual, just to see how they’re going. With electronic copies, she gets permission to keep those on file. With the print copies: “rather than kill a whole lot of trees, I’ll ask for permission and maybe just keep a couple that are outstanding examples or if someone doesn’t do that well, I’ll keep that as well, to give a range”.
Recognition is a big part of it and it’s ongoing: “Some people I can get all the recognition done almost as soon as they enrol because they give me this great portfolio. It’s very easy, it’s very clear and so they’re in. Other people I’m still giving recognition right up to the end of the course – they might take time getting their portfolio together or they might do things over the twelve months - (such as a first aid or a spreadsheet course or they might get a promotion to a new job role). I’m then able to give them that, so that’s ongoing”.
Besides all that core business, increasingly Janine spends time visiting prospective clients or liaising with the TAFE Training Consultant to explain some of the possibilities and give examples of what she’s done before.
With more work generated, the admin workload has escalated but Janine, with the help of another teacher (who is being mentored in workplace delivery) they are taking a systems approach. They’re drawing-up lots of professional looking pro forma to record all her work onto and then they upload all the documents onto a ‘faculty sharepoint’. Janine explains: “We’re putting together something for each club - things like how we workplace assess a job role, competencies to a particular job role. (Previously) I’ve had a lot of it in my head and some of it I’ve been doing rough copies. When the auditors saw what I did, they were okay with it because they could actually track what I was doing. There was a lot of cross referencing, so it was all there and they were okay with that. They could see how the assignments actually did address all the competencies in the various student assessment guides”.