- Video Insight
Why Your RTO Needs to Know Itself
- 3 mins
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Phil Bevan (Vetr)
Coming back to your comment about consultants and advisers, they have a very valuable role. I have to say that because I am a consultant adviser. I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of providers over the last 25 years. They have a very, very valuable role. So don’t go putting all of us out to pasture.
But no one’s going to understand your context better than you. So if I can put it in these terms and then come back to your question, brilliant.
If you don’t understand your own context as a VET provider, it’s going to be very, very difficult for anyone, any consultant or any external consultant or adviser, regardless of how experienced and qualified and how good they are. It’s going to be very hard for them to effectively help you if you yourself don’t understand your own context.
So you absolutely need to be looking within. And that question, I think that’s absolutely critical for providers everywhere. Hi everyone on the replay as well.
You need to understand that context. What does it mean? Just repeating it back to you: in our context, what does it mean for our students, the typical students that we support? What does it mean for this training product that we’re delivering, this course and these units of competency or accredited modules? And what does it mean in our broader context, in our region, in our city, with our personnel, with our stakeholders, with our industry, with our employers, with our delivery mode? An absolutely critical one. Are we delivering on campus? Are we delivering online? Are we delivering in workplaces, trainees and apprentices as an example?
So if we’re asking that question, what does it mean, the answer, as you say, requires the context. What does this mean in our context, because we’re delivering workplace-based training? Or what does it mean in our context, because we’re delivering online? What does it mean in our context, because we’re delivering the White Card unit of competency, single unit, short course? What does it mean in our context, being supporting students who are 15 years of age and have never worked before, and have had potentially poor education experiences previously, and potentially have a whole range of LLN challenges?
So when you bring it into your context, what you understand, what you’re doing in your provider, it makes it a lot easier, as you mentioned, to answer that question: what does it mean?
Yeah. So that idea of bringing everything into the most immediate front. So I like that, it’s beyond the RTO itself. It’s the training product as well, because not all training products are equal. The way you treat a training product in the context of a standard is different to another training product you may also deliver.
Key Points
- Consultants add value, but self-knowledge comes first. External advisers with decades of experience cannot substitute for an RTO's own understanding of its context.
- Understanding your context is critical to compliance. If an RTO does not know itself, it will struggle to correctly interpret or implement any training standard or regulatory requirement.
- Three layers of context every RTO must know: Your students, your training products, your broader delivery context
- Delivery mode shapes meaning. What a standard requires in a workplace-based apprenticeship setting is different from what it requires in a fully online or single-unit short-course environment.
- Learner demographics matter. Supporting 15-year-old students with limited work history and potential LLN challenges demands a different contextual reading of standards than supporting experienced adult workers.