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From the Desk of the CEO – December 2019 Newsletter Address

Welcome to the last newsletter of the year 2019 before we shut down operations for the Christmas break.

This month, we wrapped-up the School Leaders Learning and Development  program in Fiji, which was successfully delivered between November 2018 and August 2019 by our team of qualified education consultants comprising Mike Prime, team leader, Cate van der Vossen, Maria Doyle, and Clinton Glendinning, and coordinated by our Director International Development Services, Lee Jackson.

Another important achievement of the year 2019 has been the workshop on TVET systems delivered in June by Bob Paton. Sustainable Skills was appointed by the Australian High Commission (AHC) in Nairobi to deliver a 5-day workshop about TVET Governance, Monitoring and Evaluation to 20 local TVET coordinators selected by the Kenyan Ministry of Education. The activity was well received and we are glad to share here a video interview to James Onyango, Assistant Director at the Kenyan Department of Vocational Education and Training, talking about his positive experience with the workshop.

Recently, Sustainable Skills was contracted to conduct a review of the Karrayili Adult Education Centre in Fitzroy Crossing. The Marra Worra Worra Aboriginal Corporation owns the facility and is keen to utilise it fully to benefit the community in the Fitzroy Valley. Lee Jackson spent time there talking to the key stakeholders, and is finalising a report recommending the type of role for Karrayili that will most benefit the community.

Drawing on our two-year experience working with the Indonesian Government to improve their TVET system, in September, I was asked to testify before a Senate Committee about the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA). Signed on 4th March 2019, the IA-CEPA creates a framework for Australia and Indonesia to unlock the vast potential of the bilateral economic partnership, fostering economic cooperation between businesses, communities and individuals.

I am currently in Jakarta to consolidate the strong position developed by our organisation in Indonesia. In April, President Joko Widodo won a second term election. Mr. Widodo has placed the reform of education and training as a priority of his campaign to improve the quality and competitiveness of his country’s human resources. Over the past five years, the Widodo Government has focussed on an ambitious plan to expand energy supply, transport and shipping and logistics and to rapidly increase the supply of international standard tourism resources. The program requires millions of skilled people that are not currently available in Indonesia. Sustainable Skills continues to explore opportunities to support Indonesia with capacity building and TVET projects.

Once again, I would like to thank all the Sustainable Skills team for their commitment to the organisation, our local and international consultants, our Board, and all our stakeholders and partners who followed and supported us over the course of this year.

Sustainable Skills will shut down operations over the Christmas and New Year period. Our last day of work will be Friday 20th December and returning to work on Monday 6th January. The Sustainable Skills team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2020.

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From the Desk of the CEO – August 2019 Newsletter Address

Indonesia’s President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo recently called for greater cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in vocational education. Jokowi said such a collaboration would be in line with Indonesia’s plan to focus on human resource development in the next five years.

In recent years Sustainable Skills has had a particular focus on Indonesia, largely because of the scale of the opportunity for Indonesian people. In our experience, there is no doubt whatsoever that a focus on vocational education and training is a fundamental plank in delivering to Indonesians a valuable outcome from improved relations with Australia.

President Joko Widodo has said repeatedly that skills development is a first order priority of his Government and that theme is evident in the policy views of leading policymakers such as Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. As the efforts to improve investment and performance on fundamentals such as infrastructure have proceeded, we have noticed a tangible shift in view among Indonesia’s Ministries and State Enterprises – an understanding that Indonesia’s progress and their performance relies on improved skills development. We have also noticed that the Government has looked to Australia – explicitly – as an ally in this effort.

Sustainable Skills has invested two years’ consistent effort in developing in Indonesia an understanding of how quality outcomes can be delivered. The emphasis has been on practical design, careful assessment and assurance and a strong relationship between training and workplace. Australia’s modular, competency-based vocational training system is coupled with strong employer engagement to allow flexibility and practical accessibility to people who often cannot afford a dedicated full time course of study. These principles are now well understood and accepted in both the key Ministry of Research, Technical and Higher Education and in other Ministries and agencies where active vocational reforms are either under way or in planning. Sustainable Skills has driven many of these activities as a partner with the Indonesian authorities and has been directly involved in the formulation of two new centres that will lead change in the Indonesian system. Sustainable Skills has also developed plans to establish an Australian led Indonesian managed training centre which has gained the support of Indonesia’s Government.

In our view Australia has a strategic opportunity to build a link directly with the Indonesian community through support for its vocational training reform. While improved capital flows, trade flows and related material events will go some way to building value in our relations, we believe that the fundamental need that Australia can help to meet is the need to raise broad levels of expertise and skills in that country. Realistically, any effective support will be altruistic in the short term. But the benefits to be gained from a greater level of confidence and capacity in Indonesian society will undoubtedly rebound to Australia’s benefit. Creation of a skills-based link will also inevitably improve the flow of Indonesian engagement with Australia’s broader education system and society. Ultimately, an Australian-designed vocational system in Indonesia is more likely to become by that means a default standard in the wider region, compounding mutual benefit.

We have observed at close range the two sides of a discussion around Australian engagement with Indonesia on education. In our view it often misses the point of the issue, which is a fundamental need. As President Widodo has said on numerous occasions, the skills issue is a system issue. The point being that it will not be fixed with incremental improvements. Yet in our view much of the discussion about education has focused on the introduction of an Australian college or university to Indonesia or something similar or the recruitment of Indonesian students to Australia or the delivery of online training from Australia which shows a lack of understanding of the challenges facing the Indonesian education sector and in any case it is the broad Indonesian fundamentals – starting at the technical high schools – that must be improved. In any case we do not see a great interest on the part of Australian education and training institutions to invest in Indonesia.

We recommend a focus in the Australian relationship on what President Widodo describes as “human capital”. Initially, this might be a focus of aid and other strategic support that aims to build broadly in Indonesian society a greater capacity to engage with economic and social opportunity. Today’s needs are basic: the skills required to build contemporary standards of infrastructure, operate modern equipment and execute processes to international standards; and the expertise to manage complex technical and conceptual issues in industry and in public sector tasks. Great value can be created if Australian expertise can be conveyed to Indonesians who then go about refocusing Indonesia’s vocational institutions. A simple, yet essential component of that is to demonstrate methods by which industry can be engaged directly to ensure that the value of skills is understood and the quality of education matches workplace demands. Critically, the system delivered must be an Indonesian system, suited to Indonesian needs and its realities.

In our view the development of Indonesia’s broad expertise and skills is a necessary pre-condition to the expansion of relations with Australia. One could see that reality as a handicap or a hurdle; either way it is an opportunity that in our view should be the first priority in Australia’s creative engagement with Indonesia.

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From the Desk of the CEO – July 2019 Newsletter Address

Between 24th-28th June, the workshop on TVET Systems, Competency Based Training, Governance, Monitoring and Evaluation organised by the Australian High Commission in Kenya and Sustainable Skills was successfully delivered by our senior TVET consultant, Bob Paton, to 20 local TVET coordinators.

Over the course of the workshop there were many in-depth discussions on the current TVET arrangements in Kenya and on how they, based on the Australian experience, could be improved to gain efficiencies and improve effectiveness. Participants were very engaged and we received some terrific feedback indicating that the workshop was well received. We’re glad to share a video interview to Mr James Onyango,  Assistant Director at the Kenyan Department of Vocational Education and Training, who talked about his positive experience with the workshop.

This month, our team leader in Fiji, Mike Prime, had the last in-country meeting with the Fijian Government, Ministry of Education, Heritage and Arts (MEHA), before flying off to Perth and complete the rest of the project remotely between now and mid-August. The meeting was very positive and feedback focussed on the excellent quality of the online learning module designed by the Sustainable Skills team to develop the skills and abilities of local school heads, as well as on the commitment and passion shown by our team.

On 15 July 2019, we celebrated the World Youth Skills Day designated by the United Nations General Assembly to create greater awareness of the importance of TVET for youth around the globe. This year’s theme, “Learning to learn for life and work”, advocates for skills development to improve young people’s access to decent work, in line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) which aims at “ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”.

The World Employment Social Outlook recently published by International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that global youth unemployment rate is 13 per cent, compared to an adult rate of 4.3 per cent. TVET can play a crucial role to ensure young people around the world develop skills and competencies to access the labor market as well as contribute to a more equitable and sustainable society .

 

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From the Desk of the CEO – June 2019 Newsletter Address

This week our TVET consultant, Bob Paton, travelled to Kenya to facilitate a workshop on TVET Systems, Competency Based Training, Governance, Monitoring and Evaluation organised by the Australian High Commission in Kenya and Sustainable Skills, which will take place in Nairobi from 24th-28th June and will be delivered to 20 local Government officers.

I am glad to introduce Clinton Glendinning who recently joined our team in Suva (Fiji) as Assessor Specialist for the ‘Head of School’ Skill Development Program awarded to Sustainable Skills in November 2018. Clinton has worked for over 36 years with the Department of Education Western Australia in a range of positions and has acted in the Fiji education sector for seven years. In the coming weeks, Clinton will provide additional value-add support to assist in the training and assessment of the selected Fijian Assessors who will be assessing all Modules that current and future Heads complete.

The Fiji project team recently ran an Implementation Facilitation workshop in Suva to ensure successful roll-out of the program. The two-day session involved all key project’s stakeholders including participants from Ministry of Education, Heritage and Arts (MEHA) Learning & Development, IT, HR teams, Development Advisors and external guests from other local institutions. An update on this project can be accessed here.

Between 1 and 12 July 2019, UNESCO-UNEVOC  International Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, which assists Member States develop policies and practices concerning education for the world of work and skills development for employability, will organise a virtual conference on ‘Inclusion in technical and vocational education and training’ to discuss and identify suitable measures to support inclusive TVET, focussing on inclusion of people with disabilities as well as of other groups who are vulnerable to exclusion.

In line with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 4 on Quality Education aiming to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”, UNESCO has made equity and inclusion one of the three priority areas of its Strategy for TVET (2016-2021). The insights and evidence gathered in this virtual conference will also contribute to the 2020 UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report.

The virtual conference will take place on the UNESCO-UNEVOC TVeT Forum and can be accessed by registering for a UNEVOC account.

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From the Desk of the CEO – May 2019 Newsletter Address

Sustainable Skills CEO, Nigel Carpenter, with William Sabandar and Eka Simanjuntak in Jakarta, June 2019.

May has been a busy month at Sustainable Skills with a number of trips and promising announcements for our team.

Early this month, I met with William Sabandar, Director of the newly opened Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Jakarta, who wanted to discuss how our organisation can help develop TVET programs for the first underground railway system in Indonesia. Eka Simanjuntak, Managing Director of Willi Toisuta & Associates, our Indonesian collaborator, also joined the discussion. During the meeting, we drew on our previous experience as partner of the Sydney Metro Northwest rail link project, which between 2014 and 2016 saw our organisation working closely with Transport for NSW and major contractor to map the skilling needs of the project and create a transferable pool of workers to support the civil infrastructure and construction sectors.

A new exciting project will be managed by Sustainable Skills as we  recently signed a contract with the Australian High Commission in Kenya to deliver a week long workshop in Nairobi on the attributes of a best practice national TVET system, with a focus on governance and monitoring and evaluation. The workshop will be delivered at the end of June to 20 local Government TVET officials by our vocational education expert, Bob Paton, who has over 40 years’ experience across multiple industry sectors and has managed projects in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Korea, PRC, ROC, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico.

In Uganda, we had a change in the team who is delivering the Due Diligence and Technical Evaluation project, with Simon Elsy being appointed as the Team Leader of the project sponsored by the World Bank. Over the past  two years, this role has been effectively managed by Lisa Giammarco. We thank Lisa for her outstanding contribution to the project and welcome Simon in this new exciting role.

We are proud to announce that our ‘Head of School’ Skill Development Program is highlighted as one of the five key results achieved by DFAT as part of the Australia’s aid program to Fiji. Our team of education experts is currently designing a 10-module online course to upskill current and future principles of over 900 schools in the Country, with the first module having been successfully trialled and development of all the modules about half completed.

Over the past two years, we have worked hard to create new business opportunities worldwide, resulting in our teams of TVET experts currently delivering projects in Fiji, Kenya, and Uganda, as well as in promising opportunities in Indonesia which we hope to share in the coming weeks.

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From the Desk of the CEO – April 2019 Newsletter Address

General elections were held in Indonesia on 17 April with over 190 million eligible voters. After quick count results, current President Joko Widodo appeared set to win a second term over his challenger, former general Prabowo Subianto. Official results should be notified next month but that might be delayed in the likely case that Mr. Prabowo decides to lodge an appeal to the Constitutional Court.

Mr. Widodo has placed the reform of education and training as a priority of his campaign to improve the quality and competitiveness of his country’s human resources. Over the past five years, the Widodo Government has focused on an ambitious plan to expand energy supply, transport and shipping and logistics and to rapidly increase the supply of international standard tourism resources. The program requires millions of skilled people that are not currently available in Indonesia.

Over the last two years, Sustainable Skills has developed a strong position in Indonesia. Our organisation has worked closely with several Indonesian ministries including the Ministry of Research Technology and Higher Education, Ministry of Manpower, Ministry of Education and Culture and the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs to help develop TVET reform plans.

As part of the national TVET reform, Indonesia is establishing a new national TVET Centre of Excellence to address the fundamental mismatch between training outcomes and industry needs. Our organisation is helping the Indonesian Government to explore how the Centre can influence the broader national TVET system and develop the skills needed to support students in finding the ‘right training’ at the ‘right time’ for the ‘right job’.

The Centre will be established at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) based at Bandung and Universitas Negeri Padang (UNP). This month, I met with UNP Rektor and team in Jakarta and we reached an important milestone in this process as the Rektor accepted Sustainable Skills proposal to support the establishment of the TVET Centre of Excellence. UNP has integrated our proposal into their submission to Bappenas and the Ministry of Research Technology and Higher Education.

During my trip to Indonesia this month, I visited the Ministry of Manpower’s training centre BBPLK Serang to learn how the country is delivering renewable energy training. Australia could play an important role by supporting Indonesia in the development and execution of a training strategy to effectively build local skills in the renewable energy sector.

I also have the pleasure of moderating a session on education at the Island Tourism Forum, being held in Mataram Lombok on the 29-30 April and organised by the Australian Consulate Bali. In a bid to strengthen the tourist industry in Lombok, the forum aims to bring together government, academics, businesses, NGOs and communities to share experiences, encourage partnerships and explore investment and commercial possibilities related to the province.

Sustainable Skills has nearly twenty years’ experience shaping and maintaining effective TVET systems and frameworks in Australia and around the world. Our TVET experts have helped a number of countries to improve their TVET system. I am pleased to share a table of all the projects we have managed over the past years and we are confident that new opportunities will become available soon.

ProjectCountryDescriptionValue (USD)Duration
Workshop on TVET Systems, Competency Based Training, Governance, Monitoring and EvaluationKenyaSustainable Skills was engaged by the Australian High Commission in Nairobi to prepare and deliver a workshop for 20
Kenyans, drawn from various roles in TVET in Kenya.		15,000June 2019
School Leaders Learning and Development ProgramFijiDesign a scalable model able to develop the skills and abilities of current and future school heads to provide excellent leadership and management for all schools295,000November 2018 - August 2019
Due Diligence and Technical Evaluations UgandaDesign a model of due diligence and capacity assessment to address prevailing skills imbalances and shortages in Uganda297,000July 2017 - July 2019
Vocational Education and
Training Qualifications Benchmarking and
Development Project		Vietnam, PhilippinesCapacity building of counterpart public sector organisations
(PSO) to develop vocational education and training programs
linked to industry needs		140,0002015-2016
(18 months)
Twinning Activity with TVETA - Construction SectorZambiaBuild TEVETA’s capacity to develop industry-led occupational
standards and assessment toolkits		600,0002014-2016
(18 months)
Twinning Activity with PIREP
(Vocational Education reform program) -
Construction sector		MozambiqueBuild PIREP’s capacity to develop industry-led occupational
standards
250,0002015-2016
(12 months)
Design of a Pan-Africa Skills CouncilAfrican UnionDesign options for a pan-African skills council including a
potential skills development fund		30,0002014
(2 months)
Southern African
Regional Capacity Building
Workshops		Mozambique, Tanzania, ZambiaFacilitation of a series of workshops focused on TVET systems,
and promoting collaboration between African governments on
TVET policies		35,0002016
African
Government Study Tour to Australia		20 African CountriesTVET Advisory services for three skills
development study tours to Australia		Total value
2,000,000		2013-2014
Vocational Training Program - Construction sector Uganda,
Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania,
Namibia,
South Africa,
Zambia		Set baseline for evaluation of a vocational training program in
line with industry needs		40,0002013
(6 months)
Human Resources MappingEast TimorSupport the East Timor Human Capital Development Fund in
identifying skills limitations and make reccomendations for a
workforce planning framework		70,0002015-2016
(9 months)
Training Package - Resources and Infrastructure Sectors AustraliaDevelopment and continuous improvement of the occupational
standards in consultation with industry		2,250,000 per
annum		2012-2016
National Workforce Development Fund AustraliaManagement of an industry-government training fund. Assistance to companies in identifying appropriate training outcomes for fundingFund value:
55,000,000		2011-2014
(3 years)
Regional Integrated Training Project Agriculture and Mining sectorsAustraliaSchool-based training program to enable pathways into
productive economic sectors in rural communities		150,000
Cross-Industry training program - Agriculture, Construction, Fisheries, MiningAustraliaTraining program to build sustainable
workforces that could work across industries in line with seasonal
and economic fluctuations
1,300,0002012-2015
(3 years)

 

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Message from the Chair – March 2019

An Australian who has led one of our largest and most successful international companies very recently described our environment as a “walled garden”. It was not a compliment on Australia’s horticultural skills. In fact it describes a crippling characteristic.

For a couple of decades the global markets and industrial integration have been the drivers of change. Opportunities have abounded, creating and recreating enterprises in the mature economies and transforming nations as diverse as China, India and Indonesia. In the education sector Australia has had a flood of foreign students into its universities and colleges. Yet it is quite hard to find a sign of any integration of Australian enterprise, including those in education.

The experience with Sustainable Skills in working with a variety of national authorities, many of them near neighbours, has defined a tangible and relatively simple means of delivering what sales folk call a win-win. Both Australians and the citizens of neighbours have the opportunity for considerable benefit if we can work to build a higher standard of vocational training across the region.  Australia has good standards and a lot of knowledge in what works and Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Myanmar and possibly India demonstrate both the potential and desire to take advantage of Australian expertise.

My own learning from the experience in recent years with Sustainable Skills is that “walled garden” thinking is holding back what is a golden opportunity. Our leaders in vocational training are very often driven solely by a single dimension of the potential of their resources. That is, they want to fill the channel of students to their Australian facilities. In effect, there is no distinction between domestic and foreign students. Yet the scale of demand is massively greater than that.

If we take Indonesia as an example, the national priority is in building infrastructure. The Widodo Government has been wholly focused for at least three years on an ambitious plan to expand energy supply, transport and shipping and logistics and to rapidly increase the supply of international standard tourism resources. Very early in that process the Government discovered that the supply of skilled people was nowhere near the scale required and now the upgrade of Indonesian vocational education and training is a personal priority of the President.

The opportunity for Australia is to help Indonesia to create an Indonesian vocational education system. Sustainable Skills has found – in Indonesia and quite a few other countries – that the fundamentals of the Australian approach are both well suited and pragmatic solutions to what is often a complex problem. The flexibility of a modular competency-based system has many practical attractions and accommodates the need for people to acquire skills incrementally. The strong industry involvement in competency design and assessment is hugely important in assuring an effective outcome for workers in training and in building commitment and engagement in labour markets where skills standards have been patchy.  In short, it is quite possible that a strategic effort to build capacity in the region would create a higher standard of skills across our neighbourhood, sharply improving economic and social progress and establishing a strong and healthy basis for social and economic exchange. In commercial terms, Australian TVET would create a natural client base through pathways that allow foreign students to acquire specialised skills.

While many Australian institutions have invested heavily in international programs there is very little evidence of anything that is much more than extensions of Australian activity. That is, in our experience, where the greater value and opportunity is located. While many have been entranced by the opportunities that emerged in Japan and China over the past 50 years, somehow Australians have overlooked our nearest neighbour – a country that is expected to rank fourth globally in the size of its economy by 2050.

It’s way past time that Australian leaders knocked down any walls and let the roses run free for a while. There are risks, but the prospective rewards are almost immeasurable.

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From the Desk of the CEO – February 2019 Newsletter Address

We have kick-started the third year of activity at Sustainable Skills and we are excited about all the business opportunities currently in the pipeline.

Our teams of Sustainable Skills TVET experts are doing a fantastic job working on two crucial projects: the Head of School Skill Development Program in Fiji  and the Due Diligence and Technical Evaluations Program in Uganda.

We are now focussing our efforts on a number of potential projects  in countries, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, which are looking at the Australian TVET model as their preferred choice to set up effective national vocational education systems.

In August 2018 in Hanoi, during the Vietnam Renewable Energy Week, I met with Nguy Thi Khanhmain, Executive Director of Vietnam’s Green Innovation and Development Centre (GreenID), a Vietnamese not-for-profit organisation promoting sustainable development for the citizens of Vietnam and the larger Mekong region that is based on green and innovative technologies and methods and improved governance of the environment and natural resources.

Ms Khan is one of the founders of GreenID as well as an environmental activist, who has been working for the socially just development of Vietnam and Southeast Asia for almost 20 years. She has recently been awarded the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize – the world’s largest award for grassroots environmental activists – for her work to push Vietnam’s energy transition. She started working with indigenous communities in the mountains area of Vietnam, focussing mainly on local development and women’s empowerment before diving into energy development and advocating for a more participatory approach around hydropower development in the Mekong region.

GreenID works to achieve fundamental change in the approach to sustainable development by promoting the transition to a sustainable energy system, good environmental governance and inclusive decision processes.

In the last few years, GreenID has carried out many in-depth analysis of Vietnam’s energy system in various aspects aimed at the sustainable development of the energy industry. The aspects analyzed include the development of coal and the effects of this type of energy on the environment, air and human health.

Focussing on the potential of saving and using energy efficiency by households, industry, and power plants, GreenID has introduced some initiative about renewable energy, both domestic and international, to apply in Vietnam’s situation. At the community level, GreenID is implementing decentralized renewable energy solutions that take advantage of available local energy resources to replace harmful energy resources such as coal and oil. In the context of Vietnam’s import of coal for future power generation, green solutions not only reduce health impacts, but also reduce dependence on imported energy and even create opportunities for employment and a new growth model for the Vietnamese economy.

In this scenario, we are exploring how Sustainable Skills can assist GreenID in the development and execution of a training strategy to effectively build local skills in the renewable energy sector.

This month, we’ve launched an amazing opportunity to help you starting your next course by offering 20% off all resource kits, learning and assessment resources, and foundation skills assessment kits suitable to train and assess workers in the Resources and Civil Construction industries.

Don’t miss out on this chance, the offer ends on 4 March at 11:59pm.

 

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From the Desk of the CEO – December 2018 Newsletter Address

Welcome to the last newsletter of the year 2018 before we break for  two weeks Christmas holiday. I would like to take this opportunity to retrace the last two years of activity, since the SkillsDMC Board determined to remodel SkillsDMC into Sustainable Skills, a not-for-profit international consultancy that develops, supports and assists effective technical and vocational education and training (TVET) systems worldwide.

Our first year of activity was focussed on exploring and developing new business opportunities across different areas, building a team of highly qualified TVET consultants, and recruiting board directors able to reflect the new scope of our business across a broad range of industrial sectors worldwide. In 2017, a significant milestone was achieved as we have been officially awarded a two-year consultancy contract sponsored by the World Bank to address skills imbalances and shortages in Uganda. The 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.

Thanks to these strong foundations, the second year of activity saw us concentrating our resources on regions where Sustainable Skills expertise and background can effectively assist to build TVET systems able to meet the nation’s needs, like Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Sustainable Skills has developed a strong position in Indonesia where an important reform of the vocational education system to support the needs of a rapidly emerging economy by improving the quality and competitiveness of his country’s human resources is a priority on the government agenda. As part of the national TVET reform, Indonesia is establishing a new national TVET Centre of Excellence to address the fundamental mismatch between training outcomes and industry needs. The Centre is in the design phase of determining how it can influence better outcomes. Sustainable Skills is helping the Indonesian Government to explore how the Centre can influence the broader national TVET system and develop the skills needed to support students in finding the ‘right training’ at the ‘right time’ for the ‘right job’.

The Centre will be established at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) based at Bandung and Universitas Negeri Padang (UNP). UPI, in December, sent a delegation to Australia to learn how an industry engaged TVET system works. I’m pictured with the delegation and Bob Paton, one of our TVET experts. I also visited UNP in December at the request of the Ministry of Research Technology and Higher Education.

 

 

Another important achievement was accomplished In November, when we signed a contract with Coffey International Development to deliver a ‘Head of School’ Skills Development Program for the Fijian Government, Ministry of Education, Heritage and Arts (MEHA). Funded by the Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the program aims to develop the skills and abilities of current and future school heads to provide excellent leadership and management for all schools, with the vision of developing leadership in schools which is dynamic and works effectively in a complex, changing environment.

I would like to thank all the Sustainable Skills team for the commitment to the organisation, our local and international consultants, our Board for their support and trust, and all our stakeholders and partners who followed and supported us over the course of this year.

Sustainable Skills will shut down operations over the Christmas and New Year period. Our last day of work will be Friday 21st December and returning to work on Monday 7th January. The Sustainable Skills team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2019.

 

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From the Desk of the CEO – November 2018 Newsletter Address

We are pleased to announce that following a successful tender process, this month Sustainable Skills signed a contract with Coffey International Development to deliver a ‘Head of School’ Skills Development Program for the Fijian Government, Ministry of Education, Heritage and Arts (MEHA). The program is funded by the Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) through the Fiji Program Support Facility (FPSF) managed by Coffey.

Established to administer the education, health and scholarship programs in Fiji, the FPSF aid program supports the integration of crosscutting themes into programs, such as gender equality, civil society engagement, disability inclusiveness, child protection, and disaster risk reduction.

A review of selection processes for head of school positions in the Fijian Ministry of Education, Heritage and Arts (MEHA) had highlighted the need for a learning and development program covering the changing and higher level skills and abilities needed to lead and manage schools in to the future. As part of succession planning in the MEHA, the program will ensure that a pool of talent is developed, who can then successfully undertake the role of school head.

The vision is to develop leadership in schools which is dynamic and works effectively in a complex, changing environment, with the purpose of developing the skills and abilities of current and future school heads to provide excellent leadership and management for all schools.

The Sustainable Skills team in charge of delivering the project comprises Mike Prime, Team Leader, Cate van der Vossen, Assessment and Adult Education Specialist, and Maria Doyle, Online Learning Specialist. The three experts have been deployed to Suva, Fiji to kick-off the project which will be delivered over approximately six and a half months from November 2018 to May 2019.  The team will spend part of their time on site in Fiji consulting with stakeholders and part of their time working remotely from other locations.

The Project Team will use Moodle technology to create an online learning environment with ten modules that will be accessible to all interested learners. Moodle is an open-source learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments.

The successful tender was managed and submitted by Lee Jackson, Director of International Development for Sustainable Skills. Our organisation has nearly twenty years’ experience shaping and maintaining TVET systems and frameworks in Australia and around the world, as well as assisting Governments with the implementation of successful TVET system based on Australia best practice. Sustainable Skills has the ability to mobilise highly skilled and well-suited local and international consultants able to take key principles of the Australian VET system, understand the local culture and develop solutions. We are excited to deliver this important project that will enhance the future leadership of schools, and contribute to the quality of education offered to school students in Fiji.

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