VET News

Highlighting the Prevalence and Outcomes of Workplace-based Delivery in VET

Learning on the job can be a valuable and rewarding element of a program of study, with a recent review of evidence in this area finding it to have positive effects on the outcomes of vocational education and training (VET) students (Osborne et al. 2020). 

The specific benefits of workplace-based education on the long-term outcomes of young people in training have also been identified (Waugh & Circelli 2021). 

Three modes of delivery are possible for each subject: internal, external and workplace-based or a
mix of modes. To summarise the use of workplace-based delivery, subjects were split into three general categories:

• those that were workplace-based
• those that were workplace-based alongside other modes
• those that were not workplace-based at all.

In 2019, over 20% of all subjects were delivered with some degree of workplace-based training, representing more than 5.5 million individual subjects. Of these, just over 74% (or around 4.1 million) were not part of an apprenticeship or traineeship. Around 800,000 students experienced workplace-based delivery as part of their VET journey in 2019 outside an apprenticeship or traineeship.

Investigation at the student level shows variation in the proportion of students receiving workplace-based delivery depending on their residential state or territory. For example, higher proportions of non-apprentice or non-trainee students in Tasmania (29.5%) and Queensland (21.3%) received some amount of workplace-based learning compared with those in other states and territories. 

There was also significant variation in workplace-based delivery received between non-apprentice and non-trainee students with different study modes: 27.4% of full-time students experienced some amount of workplace-based delivery, compared with 19.9% of part-time students. 

Other student factors, such as gender and disability status, were also compared, but within these factors, there was generally a variation of fewer than three percentage points between the different categories.

Click here to access the full research report.

Date posted Oct 28, 2021