After competency-based training: deepening critique, imagining alternatives

Abstract

Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) has been ‘competency-based’ for more than 25 years. Meetings of government ministers in 1989 and 1990 mandated the competency approach for the new national system then taking shape (Harris, Guthrie, Lundberg & Hobart, 1995). The reconceptualisation of Australian vocational education that continued through the 1990s was one of a number of reforms implemented by the government to give the nation a fighting chance in the new world of the global economy. These changes were typical of a wave of ‘neoliberal’ reforms sweeping the Western world at around the same time (Harvey, 2007). In this period, vocational education systems in ‘advanced’ economies received especially close attention. It was reasoned that vocational education was well-placed to develop the highly skilled workforces that would be needed in transformed economies but that existing practices were ill-suited to the new conditions (Finegold & Soskice, 1988). The instrumental picture of vocational education in the minds of policy makers and economists carried with it a set of implications. Foremost was the idea that VET is inherently about addressing the skill requirements of employers and therefore must be designed in such a way as to be permanently attuned to their needs.