Continuous Improvement
The willingness of the RTO and service provider to seek and act on feedback from students, workplace supervisors and RTO trainers is essential to the quality of work placements.
Service providers and RTOs should also evaluate their arrangements at appropriate intervals to inform their continuing commitment and the updating of the service agreement as circumstances change.
This section provides guidance on how to ensure your work placement arrangements continue to work well for all parties involved.
Post-placement feedback
At the end of each student placement, feedback should be gathered from the student, workplace supervisor and relevant RTO staff. This feedback can inform debriefing meetings and be used to improve future rounds of student placements.
Participate in a debriefing session with the RTO to provide feedback and discuss any improvements for future work placements.
Tips for service providers
- Seek feedback from the workplace supervisor, buddy and other employees about the student’s suitability for future employment.
- Depending on this feedback and where the student is in their qualification, service providers may wish to interview the student for a potential job offer.
Participate in a debriefing session with the RTO to provide feedback and discuss any improvements for future work placements.
Tips for RTOs
- Create a process for capturing feedback from students, workplace supervisors, buddies/other service provider staff and from relevant RTO staff at the end of each placement. For example, email a simple survey to students, service providers and relevant RTO staff (e.g. trainer/assessor).
- Conduct a debriefing session with the service provider to discuss what worked and what could be improved and use this feedback to inform preparation for future work placements.
Review and evaluation
After work placement arrangements have been in place for enough time to be refined (around 12 to 18 months), both the RTO and service provider should reflect on whether the benefits they envisaged at the beginning of the relationship are being realised.
This should be followed up by an open and robust evaluation discussion. This will be easier if at the beginning of your collaboration you documented the benefits you were seeking to achieve, including any quantitative outcomes.
While this might be a reasonably informal process for some organisations, others may want to undertake a more formal evaluation, including consideration of performance information and data. For example, some service providers are tracking the conversion rate of student placements to employment outcomes with a view to comparing results across their RTO partners.
Building in a formal commitment to review the workplace arrangements at a particular date can be an effective mechanism for both parties to actively consider whether they wish to continue to collaborate and whether the benefits being achieved could be further enhanced.
Work placement student feedback survey
This template can be used by RTOs to design post work placement feedback surveys for students.
Data collection and analysis
Aged care provider, Benetas is in the process of developing a sophisticated IT infrastructure system to track work placements and student to employee conversion rates.
The system is recording data on student numbers from RTOs, when placements are required and the conversion rate of students to employment to inform future strategic relationships with high performing RTOs.
(Read more in the Benetas case study)