This is a question we are often asked as more negative news articles fill news feeds breeding uncertainty in prospective students’ minds. It’s becoming more and more important to do your research and make sure you find the right fit for you. Choosing to get qualified and boost your career is a significant, life-changing decision that you just can’t afford to get wrong.
Here are a few key points you need to note before making the call on a provider.
The first of these is the number and type of courses the RTO offers. RTOs that offer hundreds of courses from beauty and hairdressing through to nursing and forklift training are not likely to be exceptional at anything. Let’s face it, if you offer so many courses across so many discipline areas well, how can the people who make the decisions be across them all to ensure the very best professionals are providing the highest quality learning outcomes for each course? Who ensures high quality standards are developed and achieved?
The next critical questions to ask are all about who’s running the show and why they’re doing it.
Unfortunately, the trend in vocational education is for RTOs to be run by business experts and sales & marketing gurus not by educationalists and/or people who understand adult learning and how it works. While these people may be very good at making money and developing marketing campaigns that entice you in, they have to rely on their employees to deliver quality learning outcomes and, they will always cap this delivery within a tight budget so that all too often the learning and teaching falls well short of what it should be as there’s just not enough money allocated to developing the best possible courses and employing the most experienced and skilled trainers. After all the learning and teaching component of the RTO is just one part of a big business where funds are allocated more on ROI than any attempt to deliver high quality learning outcomes.
With education becoming big business in Australia, many RTOs and their executive teams come from all over the world and simply re-brand to ‘fit’ the Australian context. This means they don’t have an in-depth understanding of the Australian Qualifications Framework and the standards and guidelines that support it. Nor do they understand the basics of the Australian workplace: the legislation that underpins it, and the ways of working that set it apart from others in the global work context.
Another trend in RTOs is to form public companies. These large complex organisations answer to their stakeholders first and foremost and not the students who engage them to learn. Sadly, this has meant that there is more pressure on the boards of these RTOs to reduce costs and increase profits for shareholders. If you aren’t making them money, you simply aren’t worth their time.
SpecialisationCAL is a specialist RTO that focuses specifically on what the leaders and decision-makers of the College know intimately. We specialise in Leadership, Business and Management and only offer courses that assist students to develop and grow their leadership, management and business capabilities across a range of specialist areas such as Human Resources, Project Management, Business and Business Administration, Logistics and Building and Construction Management. This means you won’t find CAL offering courses outside of this specialist stream. In this way we can ensure that everything we do is delivered to the highest standards and, to industry and employer expectations. It also means that our quality is consistent and students can be sure they are receiving the very best learning outcomes.
ExpertiseThe CAL management team are all experts in Leadership, Business and Management and have held roles in a broad range of industry sectors, from owner/operators and managers through to senior and executive directors, GMs and CEOs. They are HR Professionals, Project Managers and have senior management roles in the logistics and building and construction sectors. We all know our stuff and have practised it for many years. This means that the courses we develop, continually update and coach you in are highly relevant and spot on, providing you with the skills and knowledge you need to perform and stand out in the role you have chosen.
SupportThe Principal and Directors of CAL all come from tertiary education backgrounds. We understand the constraints adult learners have when they return to study and we are constantly working to ensure our courses and the coaching support we provide to all our students is the best it can be. We don’t enrol and forget you and you’ll never find you’re being coached by a customer service rep. who knows nothing about the dilemmas of management in your field of study or, who can’t contextualise a learning element to better suit your work circumstances. The Principal and Directors of CAL are unusual in the sector in that all of us come from the education sector. CAL is not owned or managed by Marketers or slick Business Operators. Our priority is firmly on your learning and the strategies we can employ to better help you to do this.
Locally Owned & OperatedCAL is a private company that is wholly Australian owned. It doesn’t answer to shareholders seeking profits or greedy directors offshore. This is why CAL can keep its enrolment costs low. We know how hard it is to find money for career development in mid-career so our charter has always been to keep training affordable so that as many students as possible don’t have to take out loans for education or get ripped off with enrolment fees that can be higher than the cost of doing a degree at University!
SecurityCAL doesn’t utilise any government funding. At first glance, this might actually be a turn off for some prospective students however, what it means is that there are no loans to pay back in the future and, as an RTO we have no reason to take advantage of you. Some online RTOs make more money and higher profit margins by just signing you up and forgetting about you. They get the full sum of money from the government for your training and relish in the low overheads associated with being online. If you don’t follow through and study independently, they certainly won’t reach out and offer support. Another draw of government funded positions it that if you’re not working, you won’t have to worry about paying back the loan until you are. In the short-term, this can seem like a pretty attractive scenario.
However for students who are serious about their career it doesn’t make sense. A loan is a loan, and if you intend to earn what you’re worth, why put yourself in the position to pay back up to four times the cost of the same qualification at CAL? More than that, why sell yourself short by signing up for a lesser, cookie-cutter course that gives you little or no coaching support?
That’s not what we’re about. Because we don’t take government funds and are 100% fee for service, we aren’t reliant on any changes the government may make with regard to these funds. This means we are independently financially stable and secure. The RTOs currently closing down are doing so because they’ve lost their government funding and, as they have no other income, this bankrupts them. This will never happen with CAL.
The CAL team develops all the courses we offer. You will not find our content delivered by other providers, it hasn’t been over-simplified and it hasn’t been extrapolated to the point where it’s unusable in a real, professional setting. Our content isn’t delivered on a USB with a ‘good luck’ note and we also won’t give you all the answer keys for assessments. Our courses are written and developed for mature adults who have already spent some time in the workplace and who genuinely want to learn new skills and knowledge so that they can actually do their job better, get a promotion or change their career. If you just want a qualification for minimal effort then we’re not the one for you. If you really want to excel in your job and ultimately have a successful career, then we’ll help get you there.
