I have been a VET educator for 16 years which, combined with over a decade of frontline work in community services, forms the bedrock of my trainer matrix. But my journey with Vocational Education and Training didn’t start there. My connection to vocational learning started from very humble beginnings.
In the year 2000, when most people were celebrating the Sydney Olympics, I found myself with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which partially explained much of my situation at the time. I also found myself completing what was recognised as one of the toughest residential rehabilitation programs in Australia, little more than a collection of dongas in the bush outside Darwin.
Completing is the operative word here. Mental illness had affected my ability to complete almost anything. It had left me homeless and sleeping rough and, combined with addiction, had rendered the honours degree I had completed more than a decade earlier about as irrelevant as it was useful.
While starting recovery, I had picked up rock climbing as something of a life path and, fittingly, my first job out of rehab was managing the local climbing gym, which had fallen into disrepair, and instructing others in how to belay and climb. One condition of employment was that I complete a Certificate III in Outdoor Recreation, with my employment probationary on that basis. And that was it: my first touch of the VET ball. No essays, no lab work; instead, demonstration of skills and understanding that was essentially binary; you either could or you couldn’t. It was a nice fit with climbing and, within nine months, I had my first VET qualification.
In time, that small seed of success; completing a qualification, gave me a new path: back to the rehab, only this time as a worker who could run outdoor recreation activities. Again, there was an employment condition: complete a Community Services/Alcohol and Other Drugs qualification. I started a Certificate III in Community Services (AOD) as a trainee. This introduced another new concept: learning on the job and being assessed and signed off while actually doing the work. It was a tough, coalface kind of workplace. Learning opportunities were both hard and abundant.
I completed my Certificate III and was then given the opportunity to do the Certificate IV, a qualification that brought increased knowledge and skills, but also work roles that were more responsible and autonomous.
My next step saw me leave the rehab and start working at the other side of the AOD field: harm reduction. It was again very much coalface work, except this time with people at earlier stages of recovery. It was good work. I understood their position. I had been there too. I was a peer.
My work with the AIDS and Hepatitis Council brought me closer again to VET. Suddenly, VET teachers were booking me to come and speak to classes about recovery, blood-borne viruses and harm reduction. Going into those classrooms gave me a glimpse of a possible future.
During this time, I also had the opportunity to complete an “Assessor Skill Set” as part of a peer development project. It wasn’t much, but it was hard work to get there. Looking back, those three units were my first educational qualification. That opened the door for me to leave industry and find work in the VET sector. Again, there was an employment condition, this time a harder one: completing the full Certificate IV in Training and Assessment.
Now it was me inviting industry speakers into my classes.
Working at Charles Darwin University was great. VET and higher education existed under the same roof. It was a place of opportunity and it saw me pick up the remnants of a long-forgotten degree and gain entry into a Graduate Certificate in Education, followed by a Master of Education.
By this time, VET had taken me into teaching community services in remote communities, working with night patrol workers, youth workers and Aboriginal Health Workers. For me at that time, VET meant camping out in a community and running classes when learners had time around family, cultural and other responsibilities.
It brought me face to face with the reality that these pieces of paper remote learners were aiming for; Certificate III’s in areas such as Youth Work; could represent a ticket to personal empowerment within their home community, as well as greater mobility for work, perhaps in Katherine or Darwin.
That became the focus of my thesis: a Participatory Action Researchproject looking at pedagogies grounded in Community Development flexibility around cultural responsibilities and, as an educator-researcher, hearing the hard truths spoken by participants about where VET education had failed their community and how learning in community services meant learning to have a voice.
I finished my time in Wugularr with lifelong memories of VET, culture and personal learning. And I got my own fancy piece of paper, along with a published piece of original research in VET.
Life, being what it is, brought change: relationships, family, a move to Canberra and a return to industry.
UnitingCare Kippax, situated in West Belconnen, was a really pointy-end job. Who even thought Canberrans struggled? I was seeing up to six- eight individuals and families in acute crisis each day and, in time, was also providing case management services to families with ongoing involvement with CYPS. It was hard, emotionally draining work.
But again, VET was not far away. Canberra Institute of Technology valued industry speakers, and teaching certainly provided some respite from my work role. Another thing I noticed was how many people accessing the crisis service talked about starting a course at CIT. I lost count of how many times it appeared in case notes or case plans.
Looking back at my own rock bottom; sleeping in abandoned buildings, stairwells and long grass; education was part of a recovery vision even if I I didn’t know it yet.
So many times, particularly as a case manager, I saw people move from crisis towards control and, among the mix of recovery strategies, returning to learning and picking up where they had previously lost their connection with education. VET does this so very well. It offers a second, third, or even fourth go at learning when school, and sometimes university, did not fit.
On top of that, I saw the impact of completion. People gaining a completed Certificate III or IV in Community Services or Community Work and celebrating their own empowerment through learning.
I now sit in my tenth year at CIT. I wish I could say the gods of mental health had been kinder over that time, but they haven’t, lifelong mental illness is true to its word. There have been a few hospital stays along the way.
What I have had the opportunity to see, however, is what happens at the teaching end here at CIT: the tireless work that goes into supporting a learner who enters a course with lived experience of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence or family violence. In Community Work we don’t keep statistics on this, but the proportion of learners coming from places of lived experience is very high, as is the proportion of learners who are neurodiverse or gender diverse. Work with Diverse People is a core Stage 1 unit across all community services qualifications. CIT itself may well have have had its own hospital stays, but despite these my enduring memory of CIT is that it works with diversity and learners looking for a second chance so very well. There are an enormous number of stories of recovery and newfound wellbeing that have paralleled a completed vocational qualification at CIT.
The CIT pedagogy is firmly founded on student experience and Capacity Building; it places learners with lived experience into safe and supported learning environments, with educators navigating a balance for each learner of support vs challenge. This comes from the tireless work of educators, together with the outstanding work of student support and administrative staff. Combined, they provide a wraparound learning experience built on safety, support and respect.
What I have seen play out in Community Work at CIT is, at its core, not that different from my own experience. Vocational learning is not just about getting a job. It is about an experience that can better equip you for life, and it can be an excellent step in anyone’s recovery plan.
As surely as time passes, opportunities to grow often come from left field.
I have now left Community Work for a new challenge: becoming an educator of educators in the TAE team. I am under no illusion that it is an easy task, but the timing feels right. CIT Community Work is strong and passionate about teaching and learning. Its educators continue to go the extra yard for every learner, regardless of life situation, and it has been a privilege to have been a small part of that department’s work.
Moving on is as exciting as it is somewhat intimidating. It is also a step into the unknown, leaving a comfort zone built over more than 20 years connected to one industry area.
It is an exciting and fast-moving time. My new area of passion is technology in learning, particularly emerging technologies that may provide opportunities for innovation across the whole VET sector. And to mark this change, I have just completed my first unit of the Certificate IV in Cybersecurity.
Just as units build a qualification, VET builds people.