Skills Formation Strategies Project (SFS)
Skills Formation Strategies provide a means by which key industries and communities can analyse and address the causes of skills shortages and other skilling issues. They bring together employers, industry associations, unions, government agencies, contractors, training and education providers, businesses and communities to identify the real causes of skills shortages and barriers to workforce development, and to develop solutions.
The Department of Education Training and the Arts has funded research for six months to December 2007. This will collect stories of change brought about by Skills Formation Strategies in Child Care and Aged Care industries and will support the Industry Reference Groups in deciding the most significant change that has occurred from any source in these industries in the past two years.
The Aged Care industry research will look at such issues as: Recruitment, attraction and retention of quality staff, the Industry's public image, further education and career pathways, job design, working conditions, workforce planning, structural and policy barriers faced by people working in Aged Care, training and skill development.
The Child Care Skills Formation Strategy has looked at such issues as: recruitment, retention and working conditions, systemic controls and barriers, individual professional identity and external professional identity
Most Significant Change Research:
In 2007, the Department of Education, Training and the Arts provided funds to undertake a Most Significant Change Research with two of the strategic projects, aged care and child care skills formation strategies. This research involved requesting the cooperation of organisations involved in the strategies to allow local selection processes to identify what was for them the most significant change. The organisations encouraged their staff to write a story reflecting a significant change they had experienced in the past two years. Local panels could choose giving the reasons for the selection. These were sent on to the central panel of members of the Industry Reference Groups for aged and child care strategies. Their selection was made and reasons for the choice and for setting others aside were given.
This technique has been developed over a number of years and its guide is freely available.
Tools
The project developed story collection tools. Organisations may use these to collect stories and make selections – it can make the organisational values very apparent and helps organistions practice their values. The discussions around the selections are just as important as the final choice. The journey is as good as arriving at the destination. These stories were collected in two booklets:
Final report
This report is very interesting as it entailed further analysis of the stories for themes and mapped those themes against the key performance indicators of the skills formation strategies.
You can download this report and use the tools which are added as appendices to the report.