Continuity and change: employers’ training practices and partnerships with training providers

Detailed research method

The project used a mixed methods methodology as it was trying to find out both the extent of practices and the reasons for them (Cresswell & Plano Clark 2011). The method comprised the design and completion of two on-line surveys (‘Employer survey’, ‘RTO survey’), administered in late 2015, and semi-structured interviews with employer and RTOs. The surveys, interview protocols and associated documents were approved through Federation University’s Ethics Committee.

The aim of the Employer survey was to establish a picture of current training practices in Australian organisations including their partnerships with RTOs. The RTO survey investigated the nature of RTO partnerships with industry. Copies of the survey instruments used in the study are available at Appendices A and B of the main report. Both surveys included questions aligned with those in surveys for two previous NCVER funded projects completed by the authors.

2003 survey of employers from Enterprises’ commitment to nationally recognised training for existing workers, (Smith, Pickersgill, Smith & Rushbrook, 2005), and

2002 survey of RTOs from Working together: industry and VET provider training partnerships (Callan & Ashworth, 2004). This allowed comparisons to be made in changes in the intervening years.

The Employer survey also included some questions adapted from a 2011 employer survey by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills.

The total numbers of respondents to each survey were 173 for the Employer survey and 107 for the RTO survey. A number of questions in each survey involved automatic ‘skips’ which required participants to answer certain questions depending on their responses to previous questions, leading to lower numbers responding to some questions.

Interviews were completed over two phases. They examined training partnerships, with employers and their RTO partner organisation being interviewed separately about the same training partnership. Questions for both parties, as well as background information about the nature of the employer and the RTO, explored employers’ motivations for training, the types of training and employee groups being trained in the partnership, benefits to both parties, and a series of questions about the partnership processes. The interview protocol was adapted from the protocol used in the earlier Callan and Ashworth study and is available at Appendix C of the main report.

The two major components of the project – qualitative and quantitative – were carried out separately and findings from one were not designed to inform the other. The reason for this was that one purpose of the project was to map changes over time which required comparability of data collection methods with the earlier projects. The findings were brought together in the final analysis.

A reference group was formed (Table 1), consisting of representatives of key stakeholder groups, and recommended experts in the area. The group advised the research team at key points in the project including commenting on the employer and RTO survey instruments, and on the data collected. Members of the group also apprised the researchers of relevant VET and industry developments that might affect the project as it developed.

Table 1 Project reference group

Name	Organisation
Stephen Bolton	Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Gerald Burke	Monash University
Robyn Burley	NSW Health
Pam Caven	TAFE Directors Australia
Sandy Chong	Australian Hairdressing Council (AHC) – nominee of Council of Small Business of Australia
Dana Grgas	Australian Human Resources Institute
Michael Hartman	ForestWorks Industry Skills Council & Skills Impact
Megan Lilly	Australian Industry Group
Grant Lovelock and Tracey Murphy	Department of Education and Training, Canberra
Martin Powell	Australian Council for Private Education & Training
Tim Shipstone	Australian Council of Trade Unions
Robin Shreeve	TAFE NSW, Western Sydney Institute

Procedure and samples

Surveys

Both the RTO and Employer surveys were developed through various iterations in consultation with NCVER and the reference group and were piloted in paper form and on-line. The two surveys were designed and delivered on-line using Qualtrics Survey Software.

As planned in the design of the project, a commercial survey organisation was used to identify respondents and administer the Employer survey. Quota sampling was used to achieve sample sizes that matched the sample sizes and characteristics of the previous Employer survey mentioned above. The company emailed links to the survey to potential respondents on its multiple data bases that matched our selection criteria of locating senior people (CEOs, senior executives in charge of training, senior HR directors) who had experience in making decisions about training for their current enterprise. An initial screening question identified these respondents as holding a senior position (or having done so in the recent past) that gave them a good working knowledge of training or learning and development in the organisation. A further feature of the quota sampling was to sample organisations proportionally across different numbers of employees, to match as closely as possible the characteristics of organisations responding to the survey undertaken in 2003. The final sample was 173 respondents, with very good matching with the earlier survey by organisational size. It should be acknowledged, however, that the sampling method relied quite heavily on the integrity of the commercial company’s database.

The RTO sample included TAFE and non-TAFE respondents. All TAFE CEOs, including dual-sector universities’ TAFE directors, were contacted by email in September 2015 with a link to the RTO survey. The final sample included 20 TAFE Institutes, including one that identified as a dual-sector university, a very satisfactory completion rate of approximately 40%. The non-TAFE populations in the RTO survey were identified from data provided by the Department of Education and Training from the training.gov.au database. The sampling strategy for the training.gov.au database excluded TAFE Institutes and also enterprise RTOs, both government and non-government, and schools. The latter exclusions occurred because the survey was about partnerships with employers, which do not normally apply to these two types of RTO, for differing reasons. A random selection of one in seven organisations from this modified data base was invited to participate in the RTO survey and provided with the survey link. There were three separate waves of emails to achieve the required target of 100 total RTO responses for comparability with the 2002 survey (n=102). The total number of responses was 107; 87 non-TAFE RTOs and 20 TAFE responses. The private RTO response rate was low (5.4%), with some communications to the project team indicating that some RTOs had ceased to operate, or did not engage in industry partnerships although were otherwise very interested in the research. Because of the low non-TAFE response rate, it cannot be stated without reservation that the non-TAFE RTO results are typical of all RTOs, although the TAFE sample is large enough to be more certain about). There is no database of characteristics of non-TAFE RTOs against which our non-TAFE respondents can be measured and so representativeness would not, in any case, be possible to establish. For the RTO survey, it was requested that the survey should be completed by people in a responsible position in relation to industry partnerships. Only one respondent was sought from each institution. In this respect the survey differed from the 2004 Callan and Ashworth survey, as that earlier survey included multiple respondents from some RTOs. This difference somewhat limits the comparability of the RTO survey with the earlier project.

Interviews

Interviews were completed with nine employers and their RTO partners (i.e. nine pairs of interviews or 18 in total). The use of paired interviews, as with the earlier Callan and Ashworth (2004) project, allowed us to understand the history, nature and perceived success of the training partnership from both the employer and RTO perspectives. Interviewees were located through researchers’ networks and industry contacts, including the project reference group, and in the case of the paired interviews, we asked the person that was contacted first to seek the approval from the other person to be interviewed and so complete the pair. All interviews were conducted by phone, ranging from 30 to 60 minutes. Each interview was audio-taped and transcribed for analysis. While such a small number of paired interviews could not be claimed to be representative of Australian industry, a wide range of industry areas and employer size was deliberately sought and achieved. The purpose of the interviews was to draw out and highlight features of successful partnerships, rather than to provide a definitive picture of employer-RTO partnerships. The interview questions were primarily based on the earlier project, to enable changes over time to be identified; and all questions were ‘mirrored’ for the two parties in the partnership.