Australian TAFE is driven by a public service mission to provide quality vocational education and training for individuals and a skilled workforce for Australia. This makes TAFE a fundamental public good, nourishing our communities with skills, employment opportunities and livelihoods.

It’s a system that, as living and working Australians, we can all be proud of calling our own.

A primary success metric of this public service mission will always be student experiences and outcomes. The TAFE system is engaged in enabling the learning aspirations of hundreds of thousands of Australian students a year. It’s the success of this learning project that will see students welcomed into future employment opportunities in their communities. It’s student engagement in the TAFE system that will drive new enrolments, growth and future system sustainability.

How can we help our TAFE system make a difference in more lives and communities into the future?

A new page in the playbook

ReadyTech has experience servicing a lot of private sector providers in the vocational education sector, in addition to a growing number of leading TAFE providers. We service about 1500 RTOs across Australia, including 500 in Victoria. We’ve been blessed to service around 20 million students over the last 20 years, facilitating their journey through vocational learning into employment.

Through this exposure we’ve learned how the best of these organisations think. How they assess and launch new businesses or courses, carve out a markets, and grow their businesses efficiently and profitably. How they stay relevant. As technologists, we’ve helped them use student management systems to streamline the student lifecycle to deliver value and support thriving business models.

Ultimately, we’ve learned how they, in their own way, deliver for their students.

Leading TAFEs have always remained open to the ideas, practices and processes available in the private sector playbook. From our position servicing three of Victoria’s TAFEs with our SMS software, we’ve seen how innovative TAFEs recognise the advantages in experimenting with thinking outside the box to drive experiences and outcomes for students that stand up in a challenging market.

They are asking themselves challenging and beautiful questions and seeing where it takes them.

What would it be like to build courses as if they were fee-for-service products a new generation of learners would pay for? What would it be like to tailor, adjust and augment curriculums in an agile environment to meet fast-changing student audiences and demand? What would it be like for TAFE to seek out new revenue streams to increase sustainability into the future?

The enduring value of TAFE

TAFEs know the world of learning and work is changing fast. With education competition emerging from all directions (including from the private sector), learners in our post-pandemic landscape know there are different ways they can access knowledge and skills for the future, including being able to access many through curated global online learning platforms (or even YouTube!).

That’s why TAFEs are responding. From designing specialist pilot projects with the technology sector to ensure they are ready to deliver on digital skills needs, to pursuing new levels of student personalisation and operational efficiency through smarter use of data and analytics, they are focusing evermore closely on delivering enduring value that students seek out and embrace.

One opportunity for TAFEs experimenting with a more commercial mindset is to consider expanding their B2B product offerings and capabilities in partnership with employers or industries. There is no doubt some industry customers are hungry to partner with training providers with the scale and reach of a TAFE, so they can ensure their workforces are continuously skilled into the future.

By orienting their future around the student offering and the real current skills needs of employers, TAFEs will ensure there will be no disconnect between what students and the community might need and what is being maintained, sometimes due to funding models. They are ensuring the provision of quality training in areas of student demand that closely aligned with skills demand.

In the end, they ensure the public good that is TAFE continues to nourish more individuals and communities into the future.

Interested in learning more about how we help TAFE providers with next generation enterprise student management technology? Learn more here.