Australian National Training Packages – A Critical Analysis

In the Australian Further Education sector all education is based on national training packages which are designed and managed to meet the needs of different industries. They provide specifications of training elements; the associate performance criteria; expected required knowledge and skills all benchmarked against defined evidence guides. Significantly the do not define content or how the content should be taught with regard to both depth and scope. The advantage of this approach is flexibility with respect to interpretation and implementation. The disadvantage is potential differences in implementation. Three implementations were evaluated to assess this potential problem. The results clearly show an extreme difference in implementation. This cannot be consistent with national benchmarked standards. Further work is needed.


Australian National Training Packages
Within the Australian Further Education sector education is based on training packages.According to Service Skills Australia, A training package is a set of nationally endorsed standards and qualifications for recognizing and assessing people's skills in a specific industry, industry sector or enterprise.(Australia) Training packages are developed and managed nationally by the relevant Industry Skills Council (ISC) and consist of three components: • Units of competency: define the skills and knowledge to operate effectively and how they need to be applied to perform effectively in a workplace context.

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Qualifications framework: groups of units of competency ranging from Certificate I to Graduate Diploma level.

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Assessment guidelines: the industry's preferred approach to assessment, including the qualifications required by assessors, the design of assessment processes and how assessments should be conducted.(Authority) The ICAPMG501A Manage IT projects training package was evaluated according to a learning taxonomy and its implementation at different institutions in order to determine if this training package was equivalent regardless of institution.

Anatomy of ICAPMG501A Manage IT projects Training Package
Training packages are available nationally and can be obtained from a central web sited.All training packages are based on a standard template; only the headings directly relevant to this analysis are itemized below.According to training.gov:factors.The projects vary across a wide range of ICT, financial, management and business areas.The provision of specific IT-related project management within projects is a key component of the ICT environment.

Pre-requisites
Not applicable.

Employability Skills Information
This unit contains employability skills.

Elements and Performance criteria
Author comments -Elements describe the essential outcomes; performance criteria describe the performance needed to demonstrate the element has been achieved.The assessment of performance must be consistent with the evidence guide.

Evidence Guide
The evidence guide provides advice on assessment and must be read in conjunction with the performance criteria, required skills and knowledge, range statement and the Assessment Guidelines for the Training Package.(Government)

ICAPMG501A Manage IT Projects Training Package Analysis Method
The five elements broadly define project management that could be applied in a wide range of industries.However the performance criteria do not define what should be taught to achieve these elements.This is in keeping with the function of training packages, which according to Service Skills Australia, Despite the name, training packages do not describe how people should be trained.Rather they provide the nationally endorsed standards against which training can be develop and flexibly delivered to meet particular local, individual, industry and enterprise requirements.(Australia) Consider element 2. Undertake project planning and two of the associated performance criteria (table 1).An elaboration of the performance criteria is defined in the training package section 'Required Skills and Knowledge' which identifies the essential skills and knowledge a person must be capable of in order to perform to an acceptable standard in the workplace -referred to as learning outcomes.In effect, A learning outcome is a clear and specific statement of what students are expected to learn in a unit and to be able to demonstrate at its completion.(Wikipedia) In the case of element number 2, the required knowledge learning outcomes are generic without any specific details.This is complemented by the Evidence guide section which provides advice on assessment (table 1).The main advantage of this approach to teaching and learning is the ability to broadly interpret the guidelines and hence to be flexible for developing content to meet specific needs.However, because the required knowledge is generic and unspecified there is potentially considerable scope of radically different interpretations of both content and depth of treatment.For example the element 2, required knowledge Range of project management methods and tools is potentially subject to extremely diverse interpretations ranging from the rudimentary such a being able to list methods and tools to the other extreme of having an in-depth knowledge of them.

Learning Taxonomy Evaluation of ICAPMG501A Manage IT Projects Training Package
To produce lecture material and teach this subject a lecturer needs to know the expected depth to which the subject should be taught.The evidence guides along with the associated AQF level are indicators of the expected depth of treatment but do not provide sufficient guidance regarding depth of treatment.
The ICAPMG501A Manage IT projects training package was analyzed using the Structured Observation of Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy of assessing learning outcomes.The SOLO taxonomy defines four main taxonomy levels (excluding pre-structural) -uni-structural, multi-structural; relational and extended abstract.Uni-structural and multi-structural are low order learning outcomes allied to rote learning (table 3) (Biggs and Collis 1989).The relational and extended abstract categories represent deep, high order learning outcomes.The taxonomy levels can be related to terminology used in the training package being analyzed (Table 4).4).This strongly implies the expectation of high order learning outcomes.This is in keeping with the evidence guide and the required ability to: define, plan, execute and close a reasonably complex project to meet project requirements.

Results
To be compliant with regulatory standards each institution is required to generate further documents that include: • Training and Assessment Strategy (TAS)

Table 1 .
Element, Performance criteria, required knowledge, and Evidence guide

Table 4 .
Evaluation of performance criteria