eCoP meeting - Guest Presenter George Holt, Head of Department Information Technology https://webconf.det.nsw.edu.au/iitaa/

eCoP meeting - Guest Presenter George Holt, Head of Department Information Technology https://webconf.det.nsw.edu.au/iitaa/

In this session George will report on his recent five week study tour to Europe and draw comparisons to identify opportunities for development in Australia.

This five week study tour conducted in April and May 2016 was focused on interviews with both education and business stakeholders in Finland, Austria and Tasmania.

Finland is ranked No 1 in Education in the OECD rankings, Austria has one of the world’s highest rates of workplace training. TASTAFE in Hobart is doing an excellent job with strong local business links.

During this time George conducted interviews with eight vocational campuses, two Ministries of Education, representatives from businesses and fourteen lecturers from IT, Electronics and Business faculties. This gave him a unique opportunity to identify strengths from the European system that could be applied to strengthen regional development in Australia.

In George’s words….

‘What have I learnt:

·         Australia has excellent teaching practices but we have huge opportunities to partner up with regional businesses to fine tune teaching and assessment practices to ensure that our students are “job ready”. In particular we have opportunities to improve assessment

·         Vorarlberg state in Austria has the strongest economy in Austria and this has been built on a high tech manufacturing sector. This partnership was built around their own business chambers working with the Austrian education ministry to develop vocational colleges and universities of applied science.
In other words they built their own opportunities for their own region. They are now world leaders!

My conclusions can be simply put “Partner up or Perish!”. Economic development needs a workforce that is qualified and experienced in the most modern practices. This can only be achieved by communities, businesses and educators working together to ensure our students are job ready’.

http://www.slideshare.net/georgeholt39/partners-in-vet-eu-ecop-presentation