TPP wins major training tender for New Zealand Fire Service
Tuesday 21 December 2010, 9:30AM
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Tai Poutini Polytechnic (TPP) has teamed with Competency International Ltd (CIL) to win a tender to supply trainer education to the New Zealand Fire Service for the next three years.
The New Zealand Fire Service (NZFS) is raising expectations for its training operations, which amount to some 7,500 trainer days per year, by ensuring that all staff who deliver training are appropriately qualified with external standards and qualifications registered on the New Zealand Qualifications Framework.
In addition to the core group of full time trainers several hundred of the NZFS existing 9,000 plus staff (both paid career and volunteer) have training roles from time to time that are secondary to their primary operational roles.
Tai Poutini Polytechnic’s Director of Business Development Colin McDonnell says the tender won by TPP/CIL will provide a range of services to NZFS staff including recognising and validating their existing expertise, skills and knowledge against national qualifications while at the same time providing clear pathways for their further professional development as trainers. The NZFS required a model that provides a targeted systematic development of trainers addressing regional delivery at diverse locations within a national model to provide consistency.
“Tai Poutini Polytechnic has developed innovative delivery models such as the NZFS required through its existing networks of provision to support national non-duplicative specialist vocational education and train the trainer provision in complementary areas such as emergency management, search and rescue, scaffolding, and industrial access,” McDonnell says. “These programmes all operate nationally and in diverse locations meeting the needs of both volunteer groups and paid employees.”
Tai Poutini Polytechnic has great deal of experience over the past decade in providing workplace based ‘train the trainer’ programmes contextualised for the particular industry area. It has developed specific versions of the National Certificates and Diploma in Adult Education and Training to meet the particular needs of different types of trainers from company or ITO based workplace trainers and assessors, to tutors working with Tertiary Institutes and PTEs, to a version specifically to meet the needs of ACE tutors.
A significant part of this tailored educational delivery has been through joint venture arrangements with Competency International Ltd – a Porirua based company with significant experience of its own in competency assessment at New Zealand and international levels.
“Both TPP and CIL are delighted to have won a major training contract for an organisation the size and complexity of the New Zealand Fire Service and look forward to showing our skills in providing successful outcomes,” McDonnell says.