Interpreting your training package

In brief, the Training Package unit is about how to:

• identify which Package you need
• get a copy of it
• identify how to apply it for particular needs
• interpret correctly all its requirements
• select the right units
• contextualize units to meet the needs you face

To complete this unit, you will need Training Packages and a real or simulated (and realistic) training need that you wish to meet.

You are not really required to do the unit on using endorsed packages without help. In fact, your willingness to seek advice is part of the unit requirements. You will need to communicate clearly and be committed to working collaboratively.

Stage 1: Find the right Training Package

Find out which Training Packages or accredited courses could meet your students' needs and get a copy.

The website training.gov.au is the place to start. Click here for step by step instructions on how to get one and navigate it. (Opens a new window)

Or your RTO's website if it has good course descriptions.

As different packages often have similar units, you might compare different packages to see which best suits your need. Read them carefully to see whether they are helpful. Some units have very narrow context statements and can't be used for anything else.

If necessary, find any other information you need to clarify the content and requirements of the Training Package.

Packages are very flexible, but some are so general that they need interpreting to be useful. For example, the element "Conduct effective youth programs" could apply equally to:

• community support programs for unemployed youth, and,
• church programs for upper middle class youth,
• itinerant special programs for high school students.

Consequently, the element will need a lot of interpretation to make it useful.

You will probably also need to get other written information and interpret it according to your needs. Look up the websites first. There might be an Implementation Guide for the package and supplementary information produced by the Industry Training Advisory Body (ITAB). Standards other than endorsed packages are so varied that we can't discuss them here. However, if you identified them, then you must have seen why they are relevant to what you are doing.

When you find what appears to be a suitable package, find any issues that affect how you might use the standard. By the way, you can use accredited courses as well if you like. You will need to refine specific learning outcomes according to the program requirements and the specific needs of individual students.

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Stage 2: Consider your RTO's scope

If your organization is a Registered Training Organization (RTO), you must consider its scope, that is, the range of qualifications that it is approved to issue at any particular time. Although the RTO is registered, you cannot simply teach anything you want and issue nationally recognized qualifications and statements of attainment.

If you want to teach a qualification from a Training Package, you will need to find out whether it is within your scope. As an alternative, you might be able to offer what you want as the optional units for a Statement of Attainment in a course that is already within your scope.

You can easily find out your RTO's scope by going to http://training.gov.au/Home/Tga (Link opens new page), scroll down to the search boxes, type in your RTO's name in teh RTO search box. When your RTO details appear, click on the "Scope" tab.

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Stage 3: Read and interpret the qualification requirements

The qualifications framework in a Training Package is a list of its qualifications and the requirements for each one. Select the qualification that suits your students. The qualifications framework will give you a clear idea of what the qualifications are about. The qualification and unit titles should give you a good idea of what is in it and how it works.

To find the requirements for a qualification in a Training Package, open it in your pdf reader, and scroll down to the contents page. You will notice a list of qualifications. Click on the title of a qualification, and the hyperlink will take you straight to the page that lists the requirements for that particular qualificatiton.

If you already know the title of the qualification:

1. Open Training Package in your pdf reader.
2. Open the search function of the pdf reader (e.g. cntrl-F).
3. Type in the qualification that you want in the search box
1. If I'm looking for a Certificate IV, I usually type in a string like "icate IV." This takes me straight to the list of Certificate IV qualifications in the contents page.
2. If you know the exact qualification number, the search takes you straight to the particular qualification in the contents page.
3. Click on the qualification title. The titles are now normally all hyperlinks and will take you directly to the list of qualification requirements.

Read through the whole qualification description. You will find that some of it is not very helpful. The main things you want are:

1. The exact title and number of the qualification
2. The list of units that can be offered.
3. Any pre-requisites to get into the qualification. You cannot enroll students who do not meet admission requirements. Beware that a formal assessment can be a lot of work.

In a qualification, units generally fall into one of three categories:

1. Required units. Most qualifications have a list of these and they are compulsory. They almost always include an OHS unit.
2. Restricted choice units. Some qualifications require, for example, "five of the following ten units." You have no choice if you will issue the qualification.
3. Free electives, which can often be taken from that training package or, sometimes, any training package. There are also lists of recommended electives. There are usually a few restrictions, e.g.
1. "must be at this level of qualification or higher."
2. "No more than one unit from the qualification level lower."
3. "No more than one unit from the qualification one level higher."
4. "Suit the total qualification and the students’ job role."

Check the different prerequisites and co-requisites between units. For example, to do a food service unit, students must have already achieved the relevant food safety and hygiene unit. Prerequisites and co-requisites and can make a qualification very difficult to offer. ( What’s the difference between a prerequisite and a co-requisite? Prerequisite: To be enrolled in a given unit, students must have already been assessed as competent in a pre-requisite unit.

Co-requisite: Students may be enrolled in both units concurrently, but cannot be issued one without the other. If the student is assessed as Not Yet Competent in one, they cannot be issued the other.
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Stage 4: Create your qualification

You can adapt a qualification to your local needs and teaching resources by using any permitted freedoms to define which units you will offer and how you will arrange them. In some cases, the elective units can be more important to your students' needs than the required units.

Select units on the basis of:

• benefit to students (offer units of optimal benefit)
• your areas of expertise (avoid units that you cannot deliver well), and,
• whether units fit together to make a unified learning experience for students.

Students may no longer do extra units beyond the required number of units. Even so, the range of options and electives is frequently too wide for any one RTO to be able to offer them all. It is for the RTO (or you in particular) to decide what it can offer in any one situation.

"Pipeline" qualifications

"Pipeline" qualifications define how well a job must be done but don’t specify the particular job. That is, they define the pipe fairly clearly but don't specify what you will pump through it. You could find a generalist qualification and offer it in your specific context. In some cases, the RTO can even add a line to the student's qualification mentioning the kind of specialization. For example, if you offer a general Diploma of Management to managers in hospitality, it becomes a Diploma of Management (Hospitality). They can meet all requirements in their jobs with excellence, but are quite unprepared to take a management position in another industry.

You can use whole qualifications as pipelines, especially if you select the right electives. For example:

• The Certificate II in Business can apply to almost any Certificate II position.
• The Diploma of Management can be used for almost any Diploma level leadership role.
• Some Community Services qualifications are useful for anything that students do with people in the community.

What to do with required (compulsory) units

You get no choice with the compulsory units and students need to meet all unit requirements to graduate with the qualification. But you can still adjust them to your situation:

1. When units are peripheral to your purposes, stick with the bare minimum requirements and don’t spend too much time on them. For example, if you have to teach OHS but the work environment is very low-risk, you might teach it all in an induction process.
2. The opposite is also true. In this example, in a high risk environment, you should spend much more time on it and check the OHS requirements on all you do.

Restricted choice units

With restricted choice units, you can select units to suit your particular goals. Simple. You can also adapt, cluster, and contextualize them.

Free electives are wonderful

By staying with a small range of qualifications and using them very flexibly, you can use them to save the RTO problems in needing a wider scope. Perhaps just for this kind of situation, the AQF allows RTOs a free choice in putting its own industry descriptor at the end of a qualification title.

Here are my tips:

1. If you want a very generic qualification that simplifies life and works for marginal students with minimal ability, you can:
1. choose "how to have a job" units.
2. choose units that have considerable overlap with units that you have to offer anyway.
2. You can give students the maximum learning experience by offering units that have minimal or no overlap with other units.
3. You can offer a de facto higher qualification by offering a few of the most demanding higher units in the field that you want to offer. ExampleACAS offers the highest units in addiction recovery and case management in our Diploma of Youth Work.
4. You can make it easier for students to continue to the next qualification by offering core units from the qualification at the next level up. ExampleACAS offers Certificate IV core units as its electives in a Certificate III.
5. You can offer a de facto different qualification by carefully selecting units in another field. Example 1 A Diploma of Management could have electives from the construction training package. | Example 2 We can make the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment into a TESOL certificate by offering the TESOL unit as an elective and contextualizing other units for teaching and assessing TESOL.
6. You can offer a specialization by selecting and combining units in a particular field. This means that with one qualification, you can be very creative offering all sorts of things that wouldn’t appear possible. In fact, many qualifications offer specializations and suggest combinations of units for particular roles. Example 1The BSB package has a couple of very basic workplace communication units that you can use to teach English. | Example 2In the Cert IV in Business, a selection of mostly research, writing and business units results in a class-room based university admission qualification.

When you have all the units that you want to offer, you can still make adaptations, by figuring out the best order in which to teach them. It is called "sequencing" and is an art all by itself. Follow this link to the discussion. (Link opens new page.)

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Stage 5: Read the units carefully

They should meet the needs that you are addressing and should be suitable according to the packaging rules. Read and interpret all components of the unit.

Are there any overlaps between different standards? If you need to comply with them both, develop a map of the elements and overlaps so that you can cover everything necessary. Are there apparent conflicts?

Read all through the units and make sure you understand what they mean. Don't forget to look for any:

• English language, literacy and numeracy requirements
• dimensions of competency requirements
• ways in which the parts make up a whole skill

Depending on your particular training package, you might find the language quite difficult, even for simple tasks. To illustrate my point, read How to ask your to girlfriend out to the movies using training package language.

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Stage 6: What other standards will you use?

Other than training packages, what other competency standards or benchmarks should you use? Some of these other standards might be superfluous. Others may add so much to the unit that they become unfair; they have stretched the outcome into something different.

In any case, get a copy of those that are relevant to you and familiarize yourself with them. It is also advisable that you check with your supervisor or colleagues that they are suitable and get their approval for the specific learning goals of the program.

Some other standards are:

• National competency standards that are not put into endorsed units; they just say what level of skill is good enough. When AS standards (like ISO standards) reflect competency, they fall into this category. The Australian Second Language Proficiency Rating (now called the International Second Language Proficiency Rating) is also an example.
• Controls for identified OHS hazards associated with the assessment.
• You can also collect useful information from other de facto standards:

Workplace standards

Workplace standards are helpful, and may be called policies or procedures. Many packages require you to incorporate them by stating when something must be done "according to organizational procedures."

Workplace standards are also essential when you are customizing a course to the needs of a particular organization. Businesses won't usually change their way of doing things just to accommodate you. (The exception is when you can convincingly show that it will improve their business, and they may have specifically employed your training as a vehicle for improvement.)

But different workplaces have different standards. For example:

• Some organizations do the highest quality work.
• Some organizations do fast, low quality work, believing they can make more profit that way.
• Others have weak or non-existent internal quality systems or no written standards.
• Some small organizations have inconsistent quality.
• Some have compliance systems that foster a "jump through the hoops" mentality of compromising standards.

Consequently, a qualification that is based on variable standards won’t guarantee that the student is acceptable in every work context. If a graduate moves to another workplace, they will need to do induction and to adjust to the different requirements.

What to do:

• Minimize the "moving target" problem by using a fixed industry standard.
• In the best cases, you can RPL students immediately and fast-track them to a higher qualification.
• In the worst cases, you simply have to offer less demanding units or lower qualifications.

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Stage 7: Consider AQF levels

You will need to read carefully the AQF (Australian Qualifications Framework) requirements. Here's a summary. (Link opens a new window.)

To make it easier for you to interpret units, look at the unit code. The first digit of the three-numeral code refers to the AQF level, although units are often put into qualifications that don't match their numbers. The traditional approach is to interpret unit requirements according to the AQF level for which they are offered. For example, a Graduate Diploma research paper will be longer, more complex and more original than a Certificate IV research paper.

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Stage 8: Interpret the assessment guidelines

Next, read and interpret all sections of the Assessment Guidelines of the package, so that you can apply them in your situation.

These are usually only an explanation of the assessment protocols current at the time of publication. They mostly talk about:

• complying with the general assessment standards and ethics of the VET sector.
• requiring the student to be able to actually do the job for which they are being trained in a real situation or in a realistic simulation.
• the qualifications required of an assessor. These can vary quite widely. Most simply require the same qualification or its equivalent. Some specifically allow demonstration of equivalence through RPL, and some require a higher qualification that that for which the students are being assessed. A few have allowed a generally competent person that is approved by the RTO (i.e. a high school teacher for VET in schools). The latter is especially the case when the law requires a certain level to act independently as a practitioner.

Consequently, they are often a general textbook that has nothing helpful if you know and follow the regular protocols. Besides, anything important is usually hard to find inside the ordinary stuff.

However ...

Some Assessment Guidelines have strict requirements that are extra to normal VET sector protocols. Perhaps you'll find a difficult requirement that makes you unable to use that package.

Besides, the protocols change from time to time. So you may have to meet any new requirements as well as the old requirements specified in the assessment guidelines. For example, one training package defined the dimensions of competency differently from the current quality standard.

If you are using two or more packages together, apply the Assessment Guidelines of each package.

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Stage 9: Consider clustering

Many units tend to overlap with each other. It can be better to teach and assess them together (in "clusters") to cut down on many redundancies. Look at these examples of units that cluster well ...

Hints

• When units naturally fit into some kind of project cycle, you should normally teach and assess them in clusters. It makes the units more meaningful to students and easier for you to assess.
• Sometimes the units overlap so much that "Not yet competent" in one unit automatically means "Not yet competent" in the other.
• Keep teaching and assessment separate. You can teach units in a cluster, and avoid many problems by keeping the separate lists of assessment requirements for each unit. When the same requirement is repeated between units, put a note in each unit where the assessment is, and instruct the assessor to assess it only once.
• In some qualifications, almost all units require a sound knowledge of applicable legislation. This can be combined for one assessment between all units.

Traps

It is easy to mess up assessment on clusters. It is usually not good practice to offer a whole qualification as one cluster. Here's why:

• If students are unsuccessful in one part of the cluster, how will you know how they could make up the difference?
• If a student does not complete the whole course, how will you decide which units can be listed in a statement of attainment?
• Information to the student tends to miss out necessary details.
• There are usually too many units to teach them all at once and still be effective. You usually need to slice the pie for practical reasons.
• It is more effective to make sure units in a cluster are at the same level. For example, don't mix simple or introductory units with difficult or advanced units.

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Stage 10: The pipeline phenomenon

Like pipline qualifications, pipeline units don't have much information and are more like pipelines that you can pump something through. You also have several creative ways of using units:

• You can teach pipeline units to teach almost anything you want, as long as you stick to the guidelines.
• You can cluster a pipeline unit with a content unit. For example, use a communication unit as a way to express information in youth culture.

Examples of pipeline units

• "How to have a job" units can be adapted to many jobs or sets of tasks.
• Communication units don't specify the topics of communication, so you can use them for many kinds of communication, and in different contexts.
• Community services units often don't specify the kind of work, so you can use them for a many kinds of work in various contexts.
• Research and writing units don't usually specify topics, so you can use them for researching and writing particular fields of study.
• Cultural units don't specify a particular ethnic group, so you can use them to study many different cultural phenomena.
• Audit units don't specify the particular skills or systems to be assessed. They are useful for interpreting and assessing skills or system requirements.

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Stage 11: Contextualize units

"Contextualize" means making the units work in a particular environment or for particular kinds of people. You may need to contextualize the units to suit the needs you have identified. Check with the clients first to get clarification about their contextualization needs.

Context factors include:

• Language and terminology. Simplify it or use your specific kinds of language. Remove redundancies and make sentences shorter. If your organization has its own jargon, use it. In one case, social work terminology was a hindrance in a church setting, and needed to be translated into ChurchSpeak.
• Organizations. They can be small or large, non-profit or for profit. They can have particular company needs, ethos, kinds of products or services, current business challenges, etc.
• Regions. The same unit might validly differ between the inner city and a small country town.
• Jurisdictions. Laws vary so you need to adapt to the laws in your own state or city.
• Settings. Full-time classroom students can be different from practicum-based students, volunteer or paid employee, etc.
• Work roles. Volunteers can differ from paid employees, full-time classroom students can differ from practicum-based students, etc.
• Client needs. Consider specific training needs, career structures, age, culture, background education, language needs.
• Styles and genres. Consider for example, classical vs. contemporary music.

If you do need to contextualize units, the Training Package has guidelines on contextualization with which you must comply. But many guidelines not rules; they are more like helpful instructions and lists of ideas on how to most effectively use the package.

When you have finished, seek advice to ensure the contextualization meets the Training Package standards and guidelines.

Example of a teamwork unit expressed in simple language:

Click here for a demonstration of unpacking a unit (Link opens new window)

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Stage 12: Record your findings

Write down any factors coming up from your interpretation. This will probably be the advice you give to the client or student. It will also be a first draft of your working notes for preparing to teach.

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Check. Did you miss anything?

Review your interpretation of the Package:

• Did you get everything?
• Does it suit your purpose?
• Does it fit the way you are applying it?
• Did you get all requirements and guidelines from all three endorsed components of the Training Package?
• Did you interpret them correctly?
• Double-check: do your goals meet the needs?

Now that you know what it is that students must learn, be sure that you have your own written copy.

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If you get stuck ...

You might find problems with the package. In an RTO, you really have no choice but to comply with the package even if it is wrong. However, you might be able to fix some problems through informed interpretation. For example, packages might appear unclear or inconsistent, or non-compliant with other relevant standards.

The first port of call is to ask your supervisor or other people who use that package. But the main sources of explanation or extra written information (and free advice) are the relevant ITAB and the relevant local Industry Training Council.

If you are using two packages together, you will also need to be clear about how they relate to each other. For example:

• If assessment procedures are substantially different, you will need to find a way to comply with them both.
• Two packages might have units that are so similar that they might be equivalent. Will you map the competencies across to demonstrate equivalence? Will you cluster them and cover both? Will you choose one rather than the other? What about prerequisites?
• Are the lists of elements and performance criteria clear enough for you to use as they are? Will you need to interpret them in any particular way?

When you think you're finished, reflect on the Training Package and the process. What did you learn? Were there more efficient ways to get through it? How would you improve the way you did it for the next time you use a package?

Luke, Amanda, Simon and Kate

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