William Beetham | March 02, 2021 from GlobalHQ on Vimeo.
Former farmer-elected DairyNZ director Ben Allomes takes his hat off to the Government for making changes to the in-job and vocational training sector, as he says the old framework was outdated, broken and creating the wrong behaviours.
Allomes, a Woodville dairy farmer, is one of seven directors on the new Food & Fibre CoVE board that is responsible for a wide-ranging sector that adds areas like forestry and seafood to traditional agriculture and horticulture businesses.
He says ongoing education is critical to anyone’s success in the workforce and he is optimistic that under the new setup, values and pathways can be put in place to make that more accessible.
Allomes says the CoVE plans to pick the eyes out of the best programmes occurring across the wider food and fibre space and then share them with others in the sector to ensure there is no doubling up.
“There is a real desire to work together and a lot of people want to stop the duplication,” Allomes said.
That desire to abandon the old silo-based approach, coupled with two other changes within the primary sector, leads Allomes to believe that the opportunity to make real and lasting improvements to primary industry training has never been greater.
The first of those changes is the momentum built by Young Farmers through programmes like Agrikids, TeenAg and its network of clubs and regional competitions around the country that has increasingly led young people coming through the system to stand up and say they are proud to be a farmer. The second is the growing number of farming workplaces being led by people committed to creating an environment where employees feel valued and encouraged to undertake lifelong training in a variety of formats.
“It’s very exciting times. I got frustrated in the past and I could have thrown my toys out of the cot, but I knew the stars would align at some point,” he said.
“But my goodness, we need it to happen. There’s a big requirement for good people. And we need the right workplaces, so we don’t lose them.”
He says one of the challenges the CoVE board faces is that the new models don’t turn into another talkfest.
“It has to deliver and we need to make sure it does,” he said.
Fellow CoVE board member and Federated Farmers national board member responsible for skills and training William Beetham says the changes to the vocational training sector are long overdue.
He says the previous approach to vocational education faced a multitude of issues, including its funding model, validating qualifications and a lack of coordination across the sector.
While there will be big challenges implementing the new system, including asking training providers that in the past competed against each other to come together under one banner, he is optimistic they can be met.
“The old system failed us on so many levels. We’ve now got an opportunity to look at not just one part of the system but all of it, including what vocational training should look like and how employers can become better on-farm,” Beetham said.
“It’s got to be different.”
Dairy Training Limited manager Cath Blake says once everything comes together under RoVE, the food and fibre sector will be the better for it, with the goal being a wider and more accessible range of training and upskilling options for people available across the primary sector throughout their careers.
Blake says prior to the announcement of RoVE, the dairy industry had been pushing for a new model of training involving pathways and “credentialisation” that includes both formal and informal training engagement.
The idea is to develop a platform that can deliver training throughout a person’s whole career, providing lifelong training options rather than just at the beginning of someone’s working life, with formal training complemented by informal channels like discussion groups and short courses.
“It’s about showing a pathway that people can move in and out of, depending on where they are in their career and at what stage the season is,” Blake said.
She says it’s important that training is available at all levels, not just restricted to entry level.
That means being able to deliver training in areas like human resources and financial practices, along with people management, not just things like safe vehicle training or stockmanship, to help drive skills growth right throughout someone’s career.
Allomes agrees, saying that when he was on the DairyNZ board the biggest return per dollar of training investment was at management level.
Blake says the dairy sector needs to develop a range of skills within its workforce and that there are a lot of new tools and initiatives that can be utilised as part of training.
Videos are one of those avenues but the dairy industry has already used others, like virtual reality and voice to text software, to deliver training and assessment to suit individual learning styles.
She says it’s important to understand that changes that are part of the RoVE initiative are designed to work together and once the people involved get into their roles and are clear about their responsibilities, there is great potential to increase peoples’ skills across the food and fibre sector.
But a coordinated approach is necessary, as the last thing anyone wants is for farmers to be confused about the changes being made.
