A lack of professionalism

Now I am back in full-time employment in an enterprise learning and development environment, I look to the deficiencies of the public sector to not only gain perspective but to derive efficiencies for the betterment of trainees.

My former employer, a state government registered training organisation lacks the degree of professionalism the private sector demands. Senior management needs to learn private sector principles, this is difficult as the majority only have government experience.

The government funds training to meet workforce development requirements. I want to ensure this lack of professionalism never occurs in this in this enterprise learning environment. This shouldn't be too difficult to as the private sector expects a higher level of performance from personnel.

I can now reflect on the lack of professionalism of my former workplace and by default my former colleagues. That being said, there is a handful of highly professional practitioners, that then leaves a majority lacking both the polish and professionalism required.

This naturally hurts the trainees, undermining standards and damaging the reputation of the training organisation. Let me expand, based on my personal experiences the state of the training aids were in poor condition and mostly in a non-operational state.

My attitude always was I care little of the state of the equipment when we start, I care about the end product or outcome. I would be challenged by trainees, “how are these guys passing then?” and I never really had a satisfactory answer as I would ask myself the same question.

These projects and assessments would be assembled incorrectly, frequently have parts missing or back the front, upside down or damaged. Fasteners would be loose, missing, stripped or cross threaded.

My general approach was lock-step insofar as I would allow a degree of freedom to perform the tasks with an arbitrary stop-check sign-off along the way. There needs to be a fair degree of supervision along the process, as an academic leader, you need to be on top of this.

Before we moved to the next stage of assembly I would require an inspection by the instructor that involved referencing specifications, precision measurements including fits and tolerances, torque checks and lastly detailed individual component reports.

I studied instructional design at university at both Bachelor and Graduate Diploma level so I could claim to be somewhat of an expert in the field. My area hence was instructional design but we had the lower-level who had neither experience, knowledge nor ability.

Poorly designed, I use the term designed very loosely as no andragogical principles were used learning materials were preferred. I prefer the term thrown together by people who couldn't even be bothered to make the effort to take a basic two-day non-assessed fundamentals course let alone an entire qualification.

Trainees were given inefficient information at best and incorrect information at worst that either hindered their learning ability or taught them he wrong principles. When it came to assessment, theoretical tests were not linked to learning resources; as such, trainees were failing tests through no fault of their own.

The lack of professionalism was (and still is) a direct result of the leadership vacuum at all levels of the organisation. In a captive market and controlled market they can succeed to turn a profit through government funding including misappropriation of government funds that I identified and management covered up including systematic rorting and systematic bullying.