Our new Graduate Diploma – why we wrote it and the process of getting it accredited

In this article, we wanted to share with you the reasons why we wrote this course and a little bit about the journey we went on to get it accredited.

After years of working as consultants, RTO owners, and auditors for regulatory bodies, our course development team, started talking amongst each other about the inadequacies of professional training available for what is such a highly regulated and professional sector. Really, there was only the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and the Diploma level courses from the TAE Training Package, and the Diploma of Quality Auditing, that were at all relevant to meeting the needs of quality and compliance staff. However, these courses were really only make-shift choices as there was nothing else around and they didn’t cover the range of skills needed by compliance staff such as policy development, preparing for audits, course design and documentation, considering the needs of students and ensuring marketing compliance. So, out of these discussions over a few months, an idea was born to develop our very own professional and accredited course for VET quality and compliance management.

From there we set up an industry consultation panel with a range of professionals from the sector and held numerous meetings to gather information about what they thought the sector needed from a professional qualification perspective. Numerous conversations were had about the appropriate level for the course – should it be an Advanced Diploma, Diploma, or Graduate Diploma? Considering the complex level of a lot of the work that our target audience complete, we settled on the Graduate Diploma level and then began to map out all the job requirements of someone working at this level.

Over the next two years we then went about writing our course. We looked for units of competency from existing Training Packages to identify any units we could use that were relevant. We originally chose to write our own compliance focused units for the VET sector, however ASQA advise us in our first submission that we needed to use the BSBCOM units that are now included in our course.  We held numerous consultations with our industry engagement panel to make sure what we were writing was endorsed by industry and reflected a wide range of needs across the sector. We drafted, revised and rewrote units until they were perfect – a very time-consuming process! After perfecting the units and our qualification structure, we were then ready to prepare all the other documentation that goes into the course accreditation document and get a final endorsement from our panel, as well as a few other leading industry organisations. We were ready to submit!

After a seven-month process with ASQA, our course, the 10615NAT Graduate Diploma of VET Quality and Compliance Management was accredited in March 2017.

The Graduate Diploma includes the following units:

Since our initial offering of this course, we have made some changes to the way it will be delivered. We are now offering the course as a dual qualification combined with the Diploma of Quality Auditing meaning that students will be able to complete our 18-month program with two industry relevant qualifications.

We’re now getting ready to start our first group of students on the 30^th August. Enquire with us at [email protected] if you’re interested in hearing more.