Skills for Good - September 2023: Te Pūkenga update, Winter Booster last day, drop-in sessions for learners, and mor e

Tēnā koutou

This month sees the end of our Winter Booster enrolment offer, and we have seen a pleasing uplift in enrolments. The focus now shifts to ensuring that these newly enrolled learners become active in their training programmes - we know that if we can get our learners active within their first three months, their likelihood of successfully completing their qualification is significantly higher. I encourage you to keep a close eye on your monthly Careerforce training reports to ensure that your staff are progressing their learning, particularly your recently enrolled staff.

In this issue, we provide some detail about this week’s launch of our Te Pūkenga employer campaign, and which affirms Te Pūkenga’s commitment to growing work-based learning. A further commitment for Te Pūkenga, and indeed a continued commitment from Careerforce, is around equity and supporting equitable outcomes amongst our learners. Check out the story about our partnership with Ako Aotearoa, which is aimed at allowing us to better support our Pasifika learners.

Ngā mihi nui

Rod Bentham
Executive Director
Te Pūkenga, trading as Careerforce

As you may have read about in the media, Te Pūkenga released its decision document on its new national structures last week. This followed 5 weeks of consultation on its proposed organisational structure that received over 8,000 feedback submissions, and that contributed to a number of changes to the final organisational structure. Amongst these changes was the recognition of the kaiāwhina workforce via the creation of a focused kaiāwhina domain within the new structure. This is a great outcome as it ensures a continued dedicated focus on this critical workforce.

The focus now shifts to transition planning as we move from 25 individual divisions into a single organisation and which will progressively happen across 2024.

You can read more about the new structure here.

We'd like to remind you that the Winter Booster promotion closes this Friday 29 September 2023.

To help address workforce development challenges and financial pressures that many in our health and wellbeing sectors continue to face, we're offering:

Free enrolment on all New Zealand Certificate in Health & Wellbeing Level 2 & 3 programmes – Employer-Led Enrolments
Half-price enrolment on all New Zealand Certificate in Health & Wellbeing Level 2 & 3 programmes – Full-Service Enrolments

This is for domestic enrolments only. For employer-led enrolments, the employer assigns one of their own workplace-based staff members (registered assessor) to provide assessment support to the learner. For full-service enrolments, learners are assigned an assessor by Careerforce.

Hurry, the offer is only available until 5pm, Friday 29 September 2023.

Important - to be eligible, all Winter Booster Training Agreements must be received by
29 September 2023 and must be complete and accurate, or they risk delays or being declined. For any training agreements that get returned for whatever reason (e.g. incomplete information), they must be fully completed and loaded by 31 October to remain eligible for the Winter Booster offer.

For more information including terms and conditions, visit our website here, download the flyer or contact your Careerforce Workplace Advisor.

Last year, Careerforce | Te Pūkenga collaborated with Ako Aotearoa to host a series of workshops for our kaimahi (staff), to learn more about Pacific cultures and values.

Ako Aotearoa is a government-funded organisation supporting tertiary educators and organisations to enable the best possible educational outcomes for all learners. In 2022, they designed their ‘Introduction to the Pacific Cultural Centredness Pathway’ workshops to align with our Pacific Workforce Development Strategy: Ala Moni ‘The True Pathway’.

Careerforce | Te Pūkenga Pacific Lead, Laloifi Ripley said, “We have a strategic plan as an organisation but incorporating the Ala Moni strategic plan just enables our kaimahi to understand better our engagement with Pacific people.”

Over 170 kaimahi across all departments participated in the interactive online workshops to gain a deeper understanding of the Pacific learners we support, and how we can better serve their needs. Everyone from Workplace Advisors to the Information Systems team gained new knowledge from the course.

“Product teams are also thinking about what our resources look like for our Pacific people, and ensuring that our Pacific people can see themselves within our learning material,” Laloifi said.

Careerforce Apprenticeship Advisor, Jemma Low, really enjoyed the experience with Ako Aotearoa: “It was really insightful, and I got lots of useful tools out of it. It inspired a journey [for me] to engage more with the Pacific team because I felt more confident.”

Watch the video below or read the full story on Ako Aotearoa’s website.
Learn more about how we are supporting our Pacific learners.

This week sees the launch of our national Te Pūkenga advertising campaign targeted exclusively at you, our employers! The continued media rhetoric around Te Pūkenga as a ‘mega-polytech’ fails to recognise the fact that work-based learners account for over 140,000 of Te Pūkenga’s learner base, and that Te Pūkenga partners with over 35,000 employers across Aotearoa. These are the learners and employers that transitioned across into
Te Pūkenga from the 9 industry training organisations, including Careerforce.

As part of the Reforms of Vocational Education (RoVE) that led to the formation of
Te Pūkenga, there has been very clear recognition of the importance and role of work-based learning within the new organisation, and a very clear intent to grow the levels of work-based learnings.

This campaign recognises you, as current employers, are an extremely important part of Te Pūkenga’s future. It also seeks to highlight to prospective employers that
Te Pūkenga is New Zealand’s largest on-job training provider.

We provide a number of resources and supports for learners who identify as Māori or Pasifika. This support also includes face to face learner sessions. Please check out these pages for Māori learners and Pasifika learners and to see which face to face sessions are planned in your area.

If you have learners that identify as Māori or Pasifika, and don’t receive our dedicated Maori or Pasifika newsletters, and would like to, they can email amio.mobile@careerforce.org.nz or pacific.support@careerforce.org.nz.

As part of this ongoing work, we have now introduced the UserWay Accessibility widget on the Aka Toi Learning and Assessment platform. This widget has a range of tools to help better support our users with digital accessibility needs. The functionality includes easily increasing font sizes, activating dyslexia friendly fonts, adding contrast to the page and more!

You will find this widget on the middle right-hand side of all Aka Toi pages. To access this, click on the icon shown above in Aka Toi and see what the tool can provide. Feel free to promote it who any learners who you think may benefit from it.

Reminder about the discontinution of graduation badges and honours boards

We'd like to remind you that we are discontinuing graduation badges from 1 October 2023. Our graduates will still continue to receive formal qualification certificates in presentation folders.

At the same time, we will also discontinue the supply of Honours Boards and qualification tags from 1 October. We absolutely still encourage our employers to publicly recognise their staff’s professional development via whatever means and channels you have available.

“Our sector continues to be challenged by significant workforce shortages,” says Fiona Hamilton, Chief Executive at LinkPeople.

LinkPeople is a Community Housing Provider that helps people find permanent, stable housing and works with them to ensure they can access the health, social and wellbeing support they need to stay there.

“The Apprenticeship in Mental Health and Addiction Support is a great way to attract and then upskill new staff. They learn on the job, and can forge rewarding career pathways supported by their qualifications," says Fiona.

According to Careerforce, employers are keen to employ a diverse range of people who may have particular qualities. They may have lived experience of mental illness or a particular awareness of Māori and Pasifika culture and may not necessarily have a degree level qualification. Read more about Richard's, Willie's, and Vincent's stories.

Left to right: Richard MacDonald from Te Oranganui, Willie Tuli from LinkPeople, Vincent Brown from Arataki Ministries.

New last date of assessment for version 1 programmes
NZQA has recently extended the last date of assessment for a number of our programmes that award version 1 of the qualification. This means Careerforce | Te Pūkenga will now be closing the following programmes on 31 May 2024.

Version 1 apprenticeship programmes:

NZ Apprenticeship in Community Facilitation
NZ Apprenticeship in Community Facilitation – Disability Support
NZ Apprenticeship in Community Facilitation – Diversional Therapy
NZ Apprenticeship in Community Facilitation – Youth Work
NZ Apprenticeship in Community Facilitation – Teacher Aide
NZ Apprenticeship in Community Health Work (version 1)
NZ Apprenticeship in Mental Health and Addiction Services (version 1)
NZ Apprenticeship in Social Services
NZ Apprenticeship in Peer Support Work (version 1)

Version 1 NZ Certificate in Health and Wellbeing (Level 3), with strands in:

Health Assistance
Support Work
Orderly Services
Newborn Hearing Screening
Dental Assistance
Vision Hearing Screening (version 1 and version 2)

Until these extensions were approved, our teams had been working hard to motivate ākonga (learners) to complete their assessments by 1 November 2023. We continue to encourage ākonga to aim to complete their assessments by 1 November 2023, to allow time for marking and any resubmissions.

There are still several modules or unit standards expiring on 31 December 2023. We are encouraging ākonga who are yet to complete these, to do so by 1 November 2023.

Expiring programmes – 31 December 2023
We’d like to remind you that the following programmes still expire on 31 December 2023:

New Zealand Certificate in Health and Wellbeing (Advanced Support) (Level 4)
Dementia LCP (Level 4) (version 1)
NZ Apprenticeship in Healthcare Assistance for Aged Care – complex
NZ Apprenticeship in Brain Injury Rehabilitation Support (version 1)

Please encourage your ākonga to complete their assessments by 1 November 2023 to allow time for marking and reporting results. We are sending further communications to these ākonga and their employers.