Cafe Society: Training the workforce of the future

After disastrous scandals, TasTAFE has finally earned a glowing seven-year stamp of approval.

TasTafe chief executive Jenny Dodd sees a bright future for the training organisation. Picture: ZAK SIMMONDS

WHEN Jenny Dodd landed in the state to lead TasTAFE a year and a half ago, she had her work cut out for her.

Her first job was to steady the ship after a damning Integrity Commission investigation in 2017 exposed nepotism and credit card misuse at the public vocational education and training provider.

Transferring from the TAFE Queensland leadership team, Jenny oversaw the implementation of all 95 recommendations from a corporate auditing process of TasTAFE that followed the scandal. And she moved quickly to bring greater cohesion to the sprawling statewide organisation.

“When I arrived 19 months ago, we were very, very fragmented,” she says.

“We had 29 business units operating in 29 different ways, and you can’t run a single registered training organisation like that.”

Those days are over, says Jenny, when we meet at Courthouse Cafe across the road from TAFE’s Campbell St campus. Asserting stronger central leadership and quality control hasn’t come without pushback.

“I often hear the words ‘it’s different here’ and ‘we do it differently’, and I think ‘not that differently’. There are nuances, but every region [nationally] has its characteristics that we can have localised focus for.”

Tasmania is no different in that sense, she says, although its sense of region-to-region uniqueness may be.

“As a non-Tasmanian, you don’t realise how strong those three regions [the South, North and North-West] are until you get here,­ and there are some missed opportunities if that regional identity dominates.”

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Now, with a range of strategies in place to coax out the benefits of our scale and size, Jenny says it is time to get back to basics. In her language, that means training Tasmanians for the workforce of today and tomorrow in a changing economy.

She says the national regulator’s recent endorsement of TasTAFE as a quality public training provider, by way of a seven-year ongoing registration (the longest available period), is a big stamp of approval – and deserves to be shouted from the rooftops.

“Seven years’ registration is hard to get, and it’s a big deal for Tasmania,” she says.

“The certainty it brings gives us a great opportunity to plan for the future.

“That will require us to focus on new programs and education structures that allow existing workers to keep upskilling as their jobs transform over their working lives, while still providing all-important initial qualifications for first-time job seekers.”

It is clear the workforce will need more digital skills and adaptability. “That’s a real challenge in Tasmania, where a significant proportion of the workforce doesn’t effectively use digital technologies at work or have digital foundational skills,” she says. “It is beholden on us to deliver using digital technologies, because that’s the jobs of the future. If you don’t have digital skills you are largely not going to be effective in the workplaces of the future.”

While TasTAFE will continue to develop digital literacy among its students, especially its older cohort of upskilling students, Jenny is calling on her Department of Education colleagues to ease that foundational load by better digitally preparing school leavers for transition to higher education.

“We need people coming to us with those skills so they are able to be effective in a tertiary education environment,” she says. “TAFE will continue to develop the [older] workforce that may not have those skills.”

Keeping the staff digitally up-to-date at a teaching level also is an ongoing challenge.

“We have the technology tools already,” she says. “Now, the focus is around developing more of our own people to deliver in those contexts.”

Forging closer links to industry and encouraging greater industry investment also are on her agenda.

“We’ve always worked closely with employers, it’s in our DNA to be industry-relevant and linked, and our staff must have industry links, but we are working on making that even stronger,” she says.

Jenny arrived from Brisbane to take up her post in February 2018, just a month before the higher-profile Rufus Black arrived from Melbourne to take up the University of Tasmania’s Vice-Chancellor role. She says they are trying to foster a more connected education sector.

“It is extremely constructive,” she says. “We have a letter of agreement with principles of co-delivery, making sure that students who go from us to them are recognised for their learning.”

And she sees opportunity for more project sharing. Co-delivery of some short-course programs, including some nursing classes, at the university’s new Inveresk building is one example of the providers working together.

“The university is driving it and TAFE is providing some of the courses,” she says.

And ahead of National Skills Week, which launches on Monday, Jenny wants more Tasmanians to think about TAFE as a first choice for study. Most of all, she advises getting that magic first qualification under your belt, for it will pave your way.

As for the industries of the future, health and community services are leading the way, and that doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. Sometimes you can’t go past that human touch.