TVET college partnerships are responding to change

Research undertaken by the Human Sciences Research Council as part of the Labour Market Intelligence Partnership

In a changing policy landscape, TVET colleges are asked to improve their responsiveness to skills needs and align closer with key stakeholders in their local settings, such as firms and local government.

As part of the process of strengthening and expanding the public TVET College system, DHET is keenly promoting partnerships and linkages between TVET colleges and its stakeholders.

Partnerships can provide opportunities to enhance teaching and learning, improve graduate employment, and are seen as essential for preparing ‘students for the workplace and/or self-employment’.

How can colleges gather information on their current partnerships, and understand their potential for future partnerships? The LMIP research team is developing a guide that college strategic planners can use to inform their skills planning processes.

The guide will be practical and provide templates to help colleges to gather information on existing partnerships and capabilities.

To adapt to changes in the policy, business and education environment, colleges should aim to develop ‘interactive capabilities’. This includes the capacity to form relationships with other organisations and learn through interaction, and ‘dynamic interactive capabilities’. It means to sense change in the environment and take effective action through strategic management.

To improve responsiveness, TVET Colleges should aim to improve their understanding of the skills needs in their local settings. Gathering information on existing partnerships that college management, lecturers and other college staff may be engaged in, as a start.

Monitoring these partnerships with key stakeholders such as business is important for developing such an understanding.

The guide proposes a bottom-up approach to skills planning and development based on an innovation systems framework. It describes how to analyse the local economic context of the college, identifying the main industries, employers and drivers of changing skills needs. Planners will be able to create a visual map of the main actors in their local economic context.

Lastly, it shows how a college could analyse partnerships and linkages to identify key partnerships and missing partnerships, as well as monitor existing partnerships.

This kind of analysis of college interaction with employers, SETAs and other stakeholders is useful for identifying strengths and gaps to inform targeted interventions. In undertaking this research, colleges may identify partnerships that need strengthening, gaps in the college structure such as the need for a new routine or unit, or the need to improve co-ordination across units.

College management could use this kind of information to build the competency to sense and effectively respond to changes in the environment moving forward, rather than mainly being reactive.

The TVET College guide is one of a set of research guides aimed at building an understanding of interactive capabilities in the post-school education and training system (PSET).

The full guide is forthcoming1 on the LMIP website repository at www.lmip.org.za