RTO audit advice and RTO constancy

RTO Consulting: ambiguity on the training and assessment

Your Training and Assessment Strategy (TAS) is the most important document for your RTO, as it is the map to how you deliver and assess your qualifications or course, without this map you will not have consistency within your RTO and it will be unclear to your trainers how YOU want the qualification or course to be delivered.

The best way to ensure that your strategy truly reflects your industry requirements is to consult with your industry, this does not mean that you send out a couple of surveys and present them at audit, you really need to ENGAGE with your INDUSTRY. Engaging with your industry includes attending meetings with potential employers or managers, asking them “what are your biggest challenges when hiring staff”, “what are their wants and needs”, “what do they expect graduates from your RTO to have gained”. Check out the FAQ section on ASQA website

Successful RTO’s get industry involved with their course development, they survey them, meet with them, work with them, get involved with their industry on their level and really identify WHAT ARE THEIR NEEDS and how can we address them. RTO Compliance is a critical part of any RTO operation, ensuring your RTO has a strong compliance stranger is a important part of RTOs success. The best way to achieve this is to get RTO consultation from RTO audit experts. This works if you are starting a brand new RTO or you have an existing RTO that needs assistance with its RTO audit process. More information can about RTO consultancy can be found via the RTO advantage website.

In order to write the best plan for your Training and Assessment, you really need to drill down to “who are your target audience?”, what are their existing skills and knowledge. The way I like to describe it to my newbie clients, is imagine that you are looking into a crystal ball and think about who will be in your first class. What is their cultural and educational background? How old are the typical students? What existing qualifications and/or experience do they currently have? Your training should then be contextualized to meet the needs of those students. The better you identify your target audience, the better prepared you will be for the delivery of training.

In 2012 the Standards for RTO’s changed to incorporate Volume of Learning, which is an area where most RTO’s are non-compliant. In 2017 the government undertook a strategic review of Volume of Learning and released a report in December 2017 on short courses, ‘A review of issues relating to unduly short training’. This report highlighted that many RTO’s are delivering courses within such a short time frame that the students were not given sufficient time to learn and put into practice the skills that they are learning within the course. Since the report, we have experienced that ASQA Auditors are particularly focused on Volume of Learning when reviewing Training and Assessment Strategies, whether the delivery of the training (not assessment) incorporates sufficient times for students to put into practice the skills they are learning on a number of occasions. Many RTO’s are missing the mark when it comes to Volume of Learning, in particular they are not taking into consideration the existing skills and knowledge of the students and ensuring that the training delivery includes sufficient time for students to put the skills and knowledge that they have learnt, on a number of occasions.