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From the desk of the CEO-July 2017 newsletter address

Ben Rawlings, Sustainable Skills Director International Development Services, at Private Sector Foundation Uganda

Sustainable Skills awarded a contract sponsored by the World Bank to address skills shortages in Uganda

A significant milestone was achieved this month as Sustainable Skills has been officially awarded a consultancy contract sponsored by the World Bank to address skills imbalances and shortages in Uganda. Client of the contract is the Private Sector Foundation Uganda (PSFU) and this is the first non Australian government contract in the history of Sustainable Skills/SkillsDMC.

What’s the project about

The Government of Uganda received credit from the World Bank towards implementation of the Uganda Competitive Fund for employer-led short-term training which is part of the Uganda Skills Development Project (USDP) aimed to address prevailing skills imbalances and shortages in Uganda. An important element of the initiative is to facilitate collaboration between training providers and industry to promote demand driven skills development with special attention to innovative modes of training.

The grant component of USDP aims at:

  • supporting training activities that lead to improved productivity and competitiveness in the formal and informal sectors, hereby creating new income opportunities,
  • providing funding primarily for the improvement of the quality and relevance of existing skills systems,
  • prioritising innovative new approaches to skills development with special attention to micro and small enterprises.

Why Sustainable Skills is the right fit for this project

The technical proposal submitted by Sustainable Skills obtained an excellent evaluation from the committee, largely due to our ability to mobilise the highly skilled, highly experienced and well-suited local and international consultants to the task.

Our experience managing the National Workforce Development Fund for the Resources and Infrastructures Industries in Australia is positively recognised around the world, as well as our proven capacity to develop TVET strategies tailored to the local needs of each country. This unique background positions Sustainable Skills as a highly qualified partner to manage funds in the TVET sector worldwide, and determined PSFU decision to appoint Sustainable Skills as the TVET consultancy for this project.

What’s Sustainable Skill’s Role

Sustainable Skills team consists of highly experienced local and international TVET consultants, coordinated by Ben Rawlings, our Director International Development Services. The project involves two main steps:

  1. Due diligence: a fiduciary activity carried out to verify, validate, and assess the quality, integrity, and completeness of the key information required to make a well-informed grant funding decision and avoid waste, fraud, and abuse. Purpose of the due diligence is to ensure that all material facts relevant to the funding decision have been revealed, and that all the organisations involved in the project are honest, reliable, and fully capable of executing their responsibilities under the grant agreements.
  2. Capacity assessment: purpose of the capacity assessment is to ensure that the organisations supposed to deliver the skills training possess the required facilities, expertise and experience, such as competences of teaching staff, availability of learning material, management capacity, and the likeliness of being able to continue the activity beyond the time of the project.

We are looking forward to working with PSFU to implement this exciting Skills Development Project and we hope you’ll follow us over the coming months to get the latest updates on the project.

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From the desk of the CEO-June 2017 newsletter address

Nigel Carpenter, Sustainable Skills CEO

Nigel Carpenter, Sustainable Skills CEO

Welcome to the June edition of our Sustainable Skills newsletter!

The transition from SkillsDMC to Sustainable Skills is now officially completed. I believe it is worth retracing the pathway that our organisation has followed since the end of 2016, when SkillsDMC fifteen years’ experience as the Skills Service Organisation for the Resources and Infrastructure Industries, responsible for the development and maintenance of the RII Training Package, officially came to an end.

As a result, we have undertaken an important transition with the aim to enhance our consultancy experience building effective TVET systems worldwide, applying our proven methodology across a broader range of industrial sectors. The global consultancy activity was introduced over five years ago as a new focus to broaden and grow the SkillsDMC business. Since then, our TVET experts have helped a number of countries to improve their TVET systems including Mozambique, Zambia, Vietnam, The Philippines, and Timor Leste.

Over the last six months, our team concentrated its efforts on the development of new business opportunities. We have travelled to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar exploring how we can support and assist the development of effective technical and vocational education and training systems worldwide. We have developed relationships with TVET authorities, Education Ministries and other government departments in most countries and are exploring a number of opportunities which would make a significant difference to maximise the performance of their TVET systems, developing local skills and supporting local economies.

We are now starting to see the first exciting outcomes of our work as we are in the process of signing a contract with the  World Bank which will see Sustainable Skills TVET experts, coordinated by Ben Rawlings, our Director International Development Services, leading a Skills Development Project managed by the Private Sector Foundation Uganda.  We are proud to say that our technical proposal has obtained an excellent evaluation from the committee, positioning Sustainable Skills as one of the leading TVET consultancy organisations in the world.

We believe that our expertise together with the Australian TVET best practice can support the development of successful vocational education systems, particularly in emerging countries, to ensure equal access to quality education, lifelong learning, and employment opportunities for all.

Over two decades of activity, SkillDMC has developed a number of training and assessment materials for the Resources and Civil Construction industries for Australian and International contexts. These products have been used by training providers and operating companies to meet the training and assessment needs of current and future workers of these industries. At Sustainable Skills, we believe that these resources form an important asset for the industry and we have decided to make them available through our new e-shop that is now fully renovated, hoping to offer our clients an improved customer experience.

In this monthly newsletter we are proud to introduce Sustainable Skills Chair of the board, Michael Gill, whose senior expertise in business strategy, with a strong focus on Asian markets, is significantly supporting our international activity. This month, Michael helped us to nurture the recently created partnerships with Myanmar, where an important reform of the national TVET sector is set as a priority on the government agenda. The Ministry of Education of Myanmar has recently launched a new National Education Strategic Plan (NESP) aiming to establish an accessible, equitable and effective national education system over the next five years with the ultimate goals of supporting a sustainable economic growth for the country and equipping local students with the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century.

As a key stakeholder in the Australian TVET sector, and as a consultant to the TVET authorities of a number of African and Asian nations, Sustainable Skills has extensive and niche experience in helping Governments and Industry to reform their TVET system and can assist Myanmar to design a program that will realise its educational goals. In this newsletter we are sharing an article that summarises a number of ideas about what the reform program could look like while specifying how Sustainable Skills could be involved in the process.

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From the desk of the CEO-May 2017 newsletter address

Nigel Carpenter, Sustainable Skills CEO

Nigel Carpenter, Sustainable Skills CEO

Welcome to the May edition of our Sustainable Skills newsletter!

On Tuesday 9 May, the Australian government handed down the Federal Budget 2017 which includes important changes for the TVET sector.  A new $1.5 billion Skilling Australians Fund will be established to support apprenticeships and traineeships, with the aim to deliver 300,000 new apprentices and trainees over the next four years. States and territories will need to match federal funding to access the funds, which may result in an overall increase in money for the sector. The Fund prioritises occupations with the highest demand, especially those that currently rely on foreign labour, in industries deemed important to future growth, or have a focus on regional areas.

The establishment of a body officially appointed to implement the program and to ensure that investments are accountable and aligned to the TVET industry demand reflects the fact that the government is following a sensible process in allocating funding. In the past, we have seen how the lack of a targeted approach to vocational education funding often results in a significant waste of resources, either through the channelling of funds into oversupplied occupations or through the allocation of funding into poor quality training.

A clear example of this is the VET FEE-HELP loans program, which despite some positive outcomes have resulted in at least $2.2 billion in bad loans. In recent years, we assisted to another case of controversial effect due to the deregulation of TVET funds shown by a massive increase in the number of private colleges occurred after they could set their own fees. In 2015, many concerns were raised about price discrepancies between similar TVET courses, and the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) launched an investigation which found problems with two-thirds of private training providers audited. Consequently, many RTOs ended up having to be shut down, thus damaging the whole Australian TVET sector.

We aren’t necessarily suggesting that this Australian program will be entirely successful, or that it should be viewed as an exemplar of a funding program, but it is useful to consider the thinking that has underpinned its development. In our work with clients and partners, we strongly advocate for a demand-driven, measurable and targeted approach to funding that enables skill outcomes for those individuals and industries that truly need it. It is also important though that, beyond having the correct amount of funding available, the correct amount of resources are dedicated to ensuring the program is managed effectively – neglect in this regard can lead to the failure of even the best-designed funding programs.

We are glad to announce that, over the course of this month, the transition from SkillsDMC to Sustainable Skills has been officially completed and a new not-for- profit organisation has been legally constituted with the aim to provide TVET consultancy worldwide. These changes have better positioned our business to respond to the unique and often challenging issues that international development work often raises and we are excited to help clients and partners new and old to make the connections that matter and maximise the performance of their TVET systems.

On 17-18 May, to continue investigating new opportunities for the organisation, Ben Rawlings, our International Development Services Director, attended Latin America Downunder in Perth to explore the feasibility of expanding Sustainable Skills’ activities into Latin America. The conference and exhibition follow the format of its highly successful African counterpart, providing the opportunity for governments, companies, and other stakeholders of the mining industry to network and share their stories and experiences. The event presented the occasion to meet with representatives from Chile, Paraguay, Mexico, Guyana, Argentina, and Peru. The meetings raised several encouraging ideas that we will continue to explore.

Over the last couple of weeks, Sustainable Skills Chair of the board, Michael Gill, and I have nurtured recently created partnerships in Indonesia and Myanmar and we are confident that they will soon result in important business opportunities for the newborn Sustainable Skills organisation. I attended a meeting in Jakarta with the Human Resources and Capacity Building Strategy team at KPPIP, the Indonesian Committee for Acceleration of Priority Infrastructure Delivery established by the President to facilitate coordination in debottlenecking efforts for National Strategic and Priority Projects. We had a very long meeting which included a visit to Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) University. PLN is an Indonesian state-owned company tasked with supplying the electricity needs of the Indonesian people. During the next few years, Indonesia will need to train over 900,000 skilled Indonesians to construct a number of new power plants. We are working with KPPIP and PLN to develop a plan to ensure local people are skilled.

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From the desk of the CEO-April 2017 newsletter address

Nigel Carpenter, Sustainable Skills CEO

Nigel Carpenter, Sustainable Skills CEO

Welcome to the April edition of our Sustainable Skills newsletter!

Australia’s economic and political engagement with the immediate region and the world has evolved in recent decades, necessitated by rising living standards in Australia and improved economic opportunities in neighbouring countries. A key trend in this changing relationship with the region is the rise in trade in skills and education.

Today, technical and vocational education presents a very substantial opportunity for Australia in terms of the export of education services, which includes helping to establish and strengthen skills standards across the region. Australia is recognised as having a leading TVET system which reinforces the Australian reputation for international education and education services.

Vocational education is naturally parochial and requires close alignment with local industry and firm management of skills systems and frameworks, such as competency standards and quality assurance mechanisms to ensure the delivery of effective skills. Sustainable Skills provides consultancy that builds local capability to manage vocational education using Australian design.

As the Australian Indonesia Business Council said in its submission to the Indonesia-Australia Business Partnership Group (July 2016): “Indonesia-Australia cooperation in education, training and professional development is a perfect example of complementary comparative advantages. It will have close to the highest potential to activate transformational change in national economies and the economic relationship.”

Sustainable Skills has established successful partnerships that provide Australian vocational expertise, design and practice in developing countries. The evidence of this success has driven an acknowledgement in a number of countries of the effectiveness of Australian practices and nurtured a growing demand, especially in some of our immediate neighbours for Australian assistance and services.

Over the last few months, the Sustainable Skills team efforts have been entirely focused on the development of new business opportunities in the international cooperation sector, with the aim to consolidate our position as one of the leading TVET consultancy organisations in the world. Our work to date shows there is strong demand in developing and middle income countries for improved TVET systems and capacity building.

In April, our activity continued following this course as I had the opportunity to travel again to Indonesia and meet with KPPIP (Committee for Acceleration of Priority Infrastructure Delivery), the national inter-ministerial committee established with the main objective of coordinating the decision-making process and debottlenecking the delivery of Infrastructures projects to support the current country growth. KPPIP is facing the challenge to build the capacity of local agencies and workforces to deliver a new strategic infrastructure project in the energy sector, and Sustainable Skills long term expertise with capacity building programs in the infrastructure industry could be critical to the project success. I also travelled to Manila where I attended an Asian Development Bank conference where I was able to explore options of how we can work with the ADB as well as holding meetings with the Philippines Education Ministry and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).

At the same time, Sustainable Skills Chair of the Board, Michael Gill, travelled to Myanmar to explore potential opportunities for TVET project in the country. Michael has extensive knowledge and expertise in business strategy development projects with a focus on Asian Countries. He first visited China in 1978 and Japan in 1980 and he also travels regularly for business to India, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Myanmar and South Korea.

Sustainable Skills continues exploring opportunities in a number of African Countries. During April I traveled to Ghana to attend the Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprises (SCORE) Convention organised in Accra by the Geneva- based International Labour Organisation (ILO) . The ILO SCORE program supports practical training and in-factory counselling that improves productivity and working conditions in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and is offered by ILO to a number of emerging economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America to offer SCORE Training to enterprises.

The trip to Africa presented me with the opportunity to travel to Nairobi to follow up on some of the meetings I had during my previous trip in February, including a promising discussion with Nairobi Water and Sewerage Co, the institution in charge of providing water and sewerage services to the residents of Nairobi.

As you may remember, last month Ben Rawlings, Sustainable Skills Director International Development Services, travelled to Uganda to negotiate our participation in a Skills Development Project managed by the Private Sector Foundation Uganda. The contract has not been finalised at this stage but is progressing through the World Bank procurement process and we hope to give you further updates in the next few weeks.  In addition to managing this ongoing process, Ben will also be attending Latin America Down Under in Perth during May to speak with ministers and other key stakeholders from Latin America about the skills challenges and opportunities facing the resources sector.

 

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