Vocational Voices: Season 1, Episode 1
Is VET vocational?
Steve Davis (00:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
In the interview you're about to hear, I speak with Tom Karmel, managing director of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research about the paper Is VET vocational? The relevance of training to the occupations of vocational education and training graduates, which he produced with Peter Mlotkowski and Tomi Awodeyi.
The report looks at whether vocational education and training is as narrowly vocational as it's typically characterised when compared to school and university education, which is often depicted as broader and more generic in nature. As you'll hear, many VET graduates end up in occupations or roles outside the conventional domain of their VET courses, but they don't mind. In fact, many still claim their training was relevant despite it leading to an unintended destination.
I began by asking Tom to explain the motivation behind the research.
Tom Karmel (01:03)
Well, the reason I'm interested in this particular question is we always think of vocational education as being very instrumental. That is, training people in particular courses for particular jobs. But when we think about other areas of education, particularly higher education, we know that there are broader purposes. Many people do university degrees for a whole range of reasons, but we also know that they do very well in the labor market. And so they're using the university in education in all sorts of ways. And I guess what I was interested in was whether that, to some extent, is also the case in vocational education.
Steve Davis (01:40)
Your report says some graduates argue training was relevant even though they're not working in a relevant sector. Can you explain this?
Tom Karmel (01:49)
Well, yes, this is the whole point of the question. When you think about vocational education, you think about it in two ways. You can think about it in a very narrow, technical way. You learn a particular skill which you'll use in a particular way in a particular job. But as with all education, in fact you learn things that are broader than that, and you'll use the skills in a variety of ways. And that's what we found in this research.
Steve Davis (02:13)
And I believe the terminology used was a mismatch. A mismatch is when someone has studied a vocational course in a related to a specific career or occupation, but are now working either at a lower level in that occupation or have moved to somewhere else.
Tom Karmel (02:30)
Well, we're using mismatch to contrast from a match, and a match is where somebody does a course and ends up in the occupation for which that course is designed. So a mismatch is everybody else. And then the interesting thing is when there is a mismatch, the extent to which people are using their skills or which they're not using their skills.
Steve Davis (02:51)
As you look over the VET sector and look at the various offerings there are, did you find any particular sectors which had more mismatches than other?
Tom Karmel (03:00)
Oh well, of course. Yes. Perhaps the better way of looking at it is from the point of view of matches. We find a very close match in many of the traditional trades. So if you're a carpenter or an electrician, most of those graduates end up in those jobs. We also find a very high level of matching in the caring occupations. So if you're training to look after old people, chances are you'll end up in a caring occupation.
But in other areas, particularly in business areas, in management areas, we find a much lower rate of match. These are much broader vocational skills that people are learning, and they're making use of them in all sorts of occupations.
Steve Davis (03:38)
Would you say a mismatch is always or ever a bad thing?
Tom Karmel (03:42)
Oh, it definitely is. That's the whole point of one of the questions in the survey, which is, did you find your training or relevance to your current employment? If they say no, then this is a mismatch, which is a bad thing. After all, vocational education is about skills for jobs, and if people aren't using those skills in their employment, then I would term this as wastage.
Steve Davis (04:08)
In your report, you identify there's wastage in particular in media and arts VET based sectors. What should or could be done here?
Tom Karmel (04:19)
Well, that's a very challenging question. The truth is that there aren't very many jobs for those who do a fine arts course or a media course. There are a lot more people who want to do the courses, than jobs. So a lot of these people end up as sales assistants and that's not good use of their time.
So I guess the implication of it is perhaps we're having too many of these courses. Perhaps we should restrict the supply into those areas. Alternatively, if people are doing these courses not for employment reasons, but because they enjoy doing them, perhaps they should pay to do those courses. This is a fundamental issue for governments with fixed resources. You're interested in skills. How best do you spend your money? So I think it is a long term issue.
Steve Davis (05:04)
Given the fact that industry bodies themselves drive and inform a lot of the training that happens in the VET sector, does the prevalence of this mismatching surprise you?
Tom Karmel (05:16)
Well, I'm not sure about whether it's surprised me, but I think it does throw up challenges for those who are designing the courses. The designers of the courses have to be aware that in some of the courses, many of the graduates are going to end up in a range of jobs. And so the issue is, have they really thought about those skills in a range of contexts rather than in a very narrow context? So this is certainly a challenge for some of the industry bodies.
Steve Davis 5:42
Does this inform them changing the content in their courses, or thinking more broadly about the uses to which those courses are put.
Tom Karmel 5:50
Well, I think this is exactly right. They need to think about the uses to which the skills will be put. So they have to think that there are a wide range of contexts in many cases in which these skills will be used, and that should inform the way they teach the schools. It's also important, I think, for the students to actually understand that in many cases their course will not lead to just one occupation. They have to be realistic about how they're going to use their skills as well.
Steve Davis (06:19)
And the industry bodies driving the way these courses are done. They have a vested interest, I'm sure, in reducing the mismatch.
Tom Karmel (06:26)
Well, they certainly do. And they need to understand that there is not a really tight link between training and employment. It is much more complicated than that.
When you think about the labour market, people get skills in all sorts of ways. I don't know how many careers people go through now. People talk about five or six or seven or eight or nine careers over their lifetime. We cannot think that the skills that you get when you get trained will only be used in one way. They're going to be used in many different occupations over an individual's life. So it's a mistake to characterise these skills as being narrow and being wasted if they don't lead to the particular occupation they're designed for.
Steve Davis (7:06)
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. To download your copy of Is VET vocational? The relevance of training to the occupations of vocational education and training graduates go to www.ncver.edu.au.