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After competency-based training: deepening critique, imagining alternatives

Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) has been 'competency-based' for more than 25 years. Meetings of government ministers in 1989 and 1990 mandated the competency approach for the new national system then taking shape (Harris, Guthrie, Lundberg & Hobart, 1995). The reconceptualisation of Australian vocational education that continued through the 1990s was one of a number of reforms implemented by the government to give the nation a fighting chance in the new world of the global economy. These changes were typical of a wave of 'neoliberal' reforms sweeping the Western world at around the same time (Harvey, 2007). In this period, vocational education systems in 'advanced' economies received especially close attention. It was reasoned that vocational education was well-placed to develop the highly skilled workforces that would be needed in transformed economies but that existing practices were ill-suited to the new conditions (Finegold & Soskice, 1988). The instrumental picture of vocational education in the minds of policy makers and economists carried with it a set of implications. Foremost was the idea that VET is inherently about addressing the skill requirements of employers and therefore must be designed in such a way as to be permanently attuned to their needs.The competency-based approach appears to offer the ideal mechanism for realising the essence of vocational education as the latter was understood by neoliberal reformers. The approach, developed in the US and Canada (Tuxworth, 1989; Joyner, 1982), gives documents a central position. Occupational experts would determine and describe activities typical of competent workers, with their deliberations recorded in texts that follow a uniform format. Different instances of the implementation of the competency approach use different formats for structuring the documents, but over time and across implementations 'behavioural objectives' theory (Mager, 1962) has been highly influential. According to this theory, an effective textual representation of competent work will include a description of a key part of the job in terms of an observable performance and an indication of the standard or criterion of performance along with the conditions typical of the context of the performance. Once the competency documents have been validated in some way, they become the reference-point for vocational educator work. Educators in a competency-based system are obliged to take the documents into account when they design learning, teach and assess. The Australian implementation of 'competency-based training' (CBT), like implementations elsewhere, demands that educators rigidly adhere to the documents as they go about their work. The documentary basis of the competency approach, when accompanied by strict rules concerning their use by educators, allows unprecedented levels of control over the educational process by central authorities and employer interests, and accounts for its appeal to reformers keen to secure the contribution of vocational education to the needs of the economy.Policy makers did not underestimate the need to articulate the value of CBT to affected parties. In Australia, a centre for CBT was established which produced detailed resources to explain and facilitate implementation (Harris, 1993). Considerable effort went into developing a vanguard of educators imbued with the evangelistic spirit of the 'Training Reform Agenda', capable of pointing out the flaws of the old ways and demonstrating the new. A major administrative innovation called 'Training Packages' was introduced from 1997 that brought together all competencies relating to an 'industry', along with descriptions of combinations of them that created modular qualifications and other industry-specific instructions such as special rules for assessment (Smith & Keating, 2003). With the introduction of Training Packages the curricular revolution of training reform was complete, although the initiative has served to obscure the fact that the system is competency-based and that Australian VET rests on the production, dissemination and use of competency documents. …