Category: Employee education & training series

Microcredentials should not get FEE-HELP assistance

Andrew Norton4 Comments

In the last two years the government – the current and former governments are indistinguishable on this point – has encouraged universities to offer ‘microcredentials’, which certify and sell smaller bodies of knowledge and skills than an AQF qualification.

Government support for microcredentials

Late last month Labor reintroduced a Coalition amendment to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 that would extend FEE-HELP income-contingent loans to microcredentials, although with the potentially limiting caveat of ‘that meet the requirements specified in the FEE‑HELP Guidelines.’

Last week they promulgated a legislative instrument for the Coalition’s ‘microcredential pilot’, which offers subsidies to Table A universities to develop microcredentials. According to the explanatory memorandum ‘the purpose of the program is to examine newer, shorter forms of industry focused learning aimed at supporting people to upskill and reskill in areas of national priority such as health, teaching, IT and engineering.’

The pilot does not seem designed to attract applications – universities would have to give away their IP and accept Job-ready Graduates Commonwealth and student contributions – but the bigger issue is FEE-HELP.

Do microcredentials require government intervention?

Contrary to the impression given by some microcredential discussions, people taking short courses to increase their skills is nothing new. The ABS has asked about structured learning not for a credential many times over decades, and always found it is the most common form of post-school education on a headcount basis. The latest ABS survey is no different. Short courses overtake credentialed education by a person’s late 20s, as the chart below shows.

Microcredentials add certification and perhaps standardisation to short courses, which might increase short course informational value in the labour market. But lack of these things has not stopped this market functioning on a large scale. Proxy indicators of employee suitability such as qualifications are important for young or career shifting job applicants, but for people already established in their careers observation – directly by employers, by reputation or referee report – is usually the main information source.

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The competitive education market for workers updating their skills

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In 2019 I wrote a series of posts on declining participation in formal education and training by people already in employment. Falling enrolments ran counter to claims that technology-driven disruptions to work would make further education more necessary than in the past.

The 2019 blog posts identified nine sources of survey and administrative data that should be trending up if the workforce disruption analysis was right. All seven data sources on individuals were instead trending down, while two employer surveys respectively showed a small increase in informal training and a larger increase in online training.

Informal training is not or is poorly measured in the individual person surveys. If it is increasing while structured learning is decreasing then this may signal a change in how people educate themselves after their initial formal education.

Prompted by this week’s release of new data on one of my trend indicators – ATO self-education expense claims – this post updates my 2019 analysis. Most indicators show signs of recovery but on the latest available data three are still trending down.

Postgraduate education

Postgraduate coursework education returned to growth in 2019. Commencing on-campus numbers continued to decline but were offset by online commencements. People moving straight from undergraduate to postgraduate study complicate my analysis, as they are trying to start rather than advance their careers. On the publicly available data I cannot distinguish the two groups.

Postgraduate numbers for 2019 remain below their earlier peak, but I expect 2020 and especially 2021 to be growth years. This is partly because I see postgraduate education as counter-cyclical, with COVID labour market disruptions in 2020 encouraging further study. If this hypothesis is right data noise complicates analysis of longer-term trends, but convenient online postgraduate options are attracting students.

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The changing nature of work training: further evidence and puzzles

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In August, although I only noticed it yesterday, the OECD published a report on work-related training in Australia relevant to my recent blog posts. It has a couple of data sources I had missed that confirm the declining use of some forms of training.

The HILDA survey has a question about whether employed respondents have undertaken any education or training. Based on the questionnaire, it could have been higher education, vocational education or unaccredited training but it has to be ‘structured’. So it would not include short online self-education.

As the chart below from the OECD report shows, the proportion of workers undertaking any type of training has declined. From peak to trough, the proportion participating in structured learning for work over the previous 12 months has declined by about 5 percentage points.

HILDA work related training

I don’t have access to HILDA data, but it has several questions related to the purpose of the training that could help us understand what is going on (recalling that NCVER data suggests that training for the respondent’s current job is declining more than for a new job or promotion).Read More »

The popularity of online self-education

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A couple of weeks ago I posted on the surprising apparent decline of reskilling and retraining. Mature-age undergraduate, postgraduate, vocational qualification, ABS work-related training, and ATO self-education expenses have all trended down in recent years. These trends did not seem consistent with the oft-repeated claims of workplace change and the need to reskill and retrain.

Especially on LinkedIn, much of the reaction to the post suggested that this was due to online self-education as a substitute for credentialed and uncredentialed courses and training. While I haven’t found any time series data on how online self-education  has grown, I am persuaded that this must be a significant part of the explanation.

In a recent Pearson global survey of learners, employed respondents who required further training were asked how they did it. In Australia, organised courses or training are still more widely used than online self-education. But a third of the sample had used this method (chart below).

use Pearson

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Contrary to expectations, reskilling and retraining seem to be in decline

Andrew Norton1 Comment

We are regularly being told that in an era of technology-driven labour market change we will need to reskill and retrain much more than we did in the past. Perhaps we will. But it is hard to find evidence for this in the available data.

Let’s start in higher education. As I have noted before, mature-age undergraduate education is trending down. But domestic postgraduate coursework commencing student numbers are also down on their 2014 peak, as seen in the chart below. Education and business courses are driving the decline. Only health and IT courses have enjoyed enrolment increases since 2014.

Total student numbers are still high by historical standards. But with record numbers of eligible students (people who already have degrees), and undergraduate initial professional entry courses being converted into postgraduate qualifications, we would expect strong growth in this type of qualification. It is not happening.

postgraduate commencers

In vocational education too enrolments are trending down, including for people who already have a Certificate III or above qualification (taking the Certificate III as more clearly a career qualification than Certificates I or II). Read More »