Combined study and work pathways in vocational education and training: Policy implications and analysis

The research was conducted throughout 1998 with students and staff of three TAFE institutes in three States.

Most students in this project:

• see study and work combinations as an integral part of their adult lives
• identify a need to demonstrate, within the restructured labour market, work-preparedness, competencies, and work-experience as employment credentials
• find little relationship between their study and the types of job they have
• see little indication that their employers were interested in their studies, or that their training institutions were interested in their work

Current training arrangements still appear to be largely shaped by the norms of the industrial era, premised on:

• a linear transition 'from study to work'
• the identification of narrow 'job-specific skills'
• an assumption 'outside the apprenticeship system' that study and work are sequential rather than complementary elements of the training agenda

The actual implementation of national training policy is lagging behind student assessments of market demands, and gives little recognition to the opportunities that students are creating for themselves.

If such recognition were to be given in the future, some practical attention would need to paid to developing formal arrangements that would:

• articulate, within course arrangements and credits, modes of recognition of simultaneous work experience
• establish, between students' part-time local employers and their VET institutes, opportunities for formal industry partnerships
• give clearer recognition, within competency guidelines, to transferable 'employment skills' as an important complement to more narrowly defined 'job skills'.

The actual form such developments would depend on the extent to which the interface between study and work is given its full recognition at a policy level.

There is an urgent need to move VET policy beyond outmoded conceptions of a 'transition from study to work', and instead to reframe it in a way that takes full account of the simultaneous commitment to study and work combinations of VET participants.