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

Respondent characteristics

Surveys

As noted earlier, in the Employer survey, a screening question identified respondents as senior members of the organisation with a good working knowledge of training in their enterprise. All sizes of organisations were represented, as we matched the sample with the sample from the 2003 survey. Because of the variation in organisation size, while respondents were generally from management, some were business owners, and some were professional workers or administrators.

Over 80% of respondents to the RTO survey were CEOs or senior managers, with a small number of people in business development, quality or middle management roles. Half of all respondents who replied had set up and continued to manage training partnerships, while other respondents had those managing partnerships report to them (16%), set up partnerships only (12.3%) or managed partnerships only (8.5%). As noted earlier, in the final sample there were 20 TAFEs (18.7%), 55 for- profit private providers (51.4%) and 32 (29.9%) non-profit private providers. Approximately half (51%) of respondent organisations were metropolitan-based, and the rest were regional (39.7%) or other (9.4%). All States and Territories were represented in the final sample, with a large majority (79.4%) having their head-quarters in NSW, Victoria or Queensland.

Interviews

As Table 2 illustrates, the nine employers interviewed were from a wide range of industries. Four of the investigated partnerships involved TAFE, and five were with private RTOs. The training partnerships ranged from 2 to 20 years, and the vast majority of employer companies were larger businesses. As to be expected, the TAFE training providers were large organisations (200-850 employees), while the biggest non-TAFE RTO had 130 employees. There did not seem to be any correlation between size of employer and size of partnering RTO. Employers could not be classified according to whether they were urban, rural or regional, as many had multiple sites, two for example being headquartered in a city but having multiple regional branches.

Table 2 The partnerships

No.	Industry area of employer	Nature of RTO	Length of partnership	State(s)	Approximate size of company (workers)	Approx. size of RTO (workers)
1.	Pulp and paper manufacturing	TAFE	2 years	Vic	1500	400
2.	Agricultural services	TAFE	4 years	All states but based in Victoria	c. 5000 employees	250
3.	Expedition support (trades)	TAFE	20 years	Tas	300 plus 150 casuals	850
4.	Design and engineering production	TAFE	4 years	Vic	100	200
5.	Pathology labs-public system	Private	5 years	WA	2000	15 plus casuals
6.	Home and community care	Private	5 years	NSW	135	130
7.	Hospitality chain	Private	7 years	Tas	390	4 plus casuals
8.	Wine production	Private	17 years	SA	100	5 plus casuals
9.	Scientific research	Private	15 years	Qld	500	1

Data analysis

Data from both surveys were automatically captured online using Qualtrics software. These data were downloaded into data files suitable for analysis using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Various checks were put in place to monitor data quality throughout the survey period, including the removal of respondents who gave low quality responses (e.g. large amounts of missing data and overly rapid completion of surveys which could be tracked through the Qualtrics records, e.g. 10 minutes for the whole survey). Initial analyses involved data checking and data cleaning through the generation and inspection of descriptive analyses (e.g. inspection of percentages, mean scores, counts). Replies that were obviously inaccurate, e.g. random collections of letters of the alphabet, were removed at this stage.

In the first stage of the analyses for each survey, frequency tables with percentages and sample sizes were generated for the quantitative responses. These are provided in Appendices D and E of the main report. Next, additional analyses were completed by sub-groups or categories of respondents. For the RTO survey data, cross-tabulations of quantitative and qualitative data were undertaken by organisational type (TAFE, For Profit Private, and Non Profit Private). For the Employer survey data, cross tabulations on the data were compiled by firm size (1-49 employees, 50-99, 100-499, and above 500) and by purchaser type (recent purchaser of nationally accredited training or not a recent purchaser of national accredited training). Various methods of data display (Miles & Huberman 1994) were utilised to determine the best methods for analyses of the qualitative responses to the surveys. From these we undertook thematic analyses both across the samples as a whole, and also by employer or RTO type respectively. This stage of the analysis provided us, in particular, with large numbers of examples of, and some ‘mini-case studies’ on, respectively, the informal training of groups of employees (Employer survey), and the nature of partnerships with industry (RTO survey).

Qualitative data from the interviews were analysed in successive stages. The ‘matched pair’ interviews were written up as mini-case studies according to an agreed template. A ‘cross-case’ thematic analysis was then undertaken, focusing on the nature of the partnerships, the benefits to each party, the success factors, and challenges. A typology of partnerships was developed from the interviews, which was subsequently augmented using the partnership data from the employer and RTO surveys.

The survey responses were compared with the corresponding surveys from 2003 (Employer survey) and 2002 (RTO survey) respectively. These were carried out as follows.

Employer survey

A set of tables were produced for the Employer survey responses that enabled comparisons from 2003 to 2015. These showed that were some differences in the findings of the current survey from the 2003 survey. However there were some limitations to the comparisons. The 2003 survey analysis had divided its respondents into three categories: Enterprise RTOs (n=51); other enterprises that had used nationally-recognised training in the previous two years (which the report called ‘purchasers’) (n=34) and enterprises that had not used NRT in the past two years (which the report called ‘non-users’) (n=39). The reason for the large number of enterprise RTOs was that a specially adapted version of the 2003 survey had been sent to all enterprise RTOs¹. This was not replicated in 2015 because of other research being undertaken on enterprise RTOs by members of the research team, and in fact only two enterprise RTOs were captured in the 2015 sample of employers, and they were not separated out from the other employers. In the comparison stage, we inspected the 2003 data both with and without the enterprise RTOs that had responded.

RTO survey

A set of tables were produced for the RTO survey responses that were readily comparable from 2002 to 2015. Again, there were some differences in nature of the two surveys. Respondents to the 2002 survey (n=102) were mainly TAFE employees who managed partnerships (n=96), whereas in the 2015 survey TAFEs (n=20) represented less than 20% of total respondents (n=107), because only one respondent was invited from each TAFE Institute. The majority of respondents to the 2015 survey were private providers (n=87). The current survey analysis divides respondents into three categories: TAFEs (n=20); for-profit private RTOs (n=55) and non-profit private RTOs (n=32). Therefore, comparison was undertaken primarily between the total 2002 responses (n= 102) (the small number of private RTOs could not be separated out) and the 2015 TAFE responses (n=20).

The qualitative and quantitative data were finally brought together under three major themes, which were derived from the project research questions, the literature, and the data that had been collected:

Why do employers train?

What are the choices they make about training methods and sources of training?

What is the nature of training partnerships between employers and registered training organisations?

As part of the analysis, three models, one from each of the earlier reports and one from Smith & Hayton (1999) were updated, and a new diagrammatic representation of RTO-employer partnerships was developed. These are all presented in the Conclusion chapter of the main report.