10 - PREPARING SINGAPORE’S ADULT EDUCATORS FOR WORKPLACE LEARNING: RETHINKING THE NOVICE TO EXPERT METAPHOR Peter Rushbrook Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University Australia INTRODUCTION Singapore’s Workforce Development Agency (WDA) was created in 2003 and inherited a disparate Continuing Education and Training (CET) sector with a diverse community of trainers, the majority of whom did not have training qualifications. There were a few institutions that provided some sort of training credentials but there were no minimum trainer standards. Trainer quality control was, therefore, a major concern. The Workforce Skills Qualification (WSQ) system was developed to increase employability, improve worker performance and align industry needs with training provision. This required a certain level of skill in learning facilitation, assessment, curriculum, and courseware development not present in the adult educator workforce (Willmott & Karmel, 2011). WDA’s first system-wide qualification, the Advanced Certificate of Training and Assessment (ACTA), was introduced in 2005 to provide a basic training credential. The programme was developed using a Competency Based Training (CBT) approach. It soon became clear, however, that ACTA alone could not meet the needs of a rapidly changing CET sector. Rather, the sector required professionals with additional abilities to address complex workplace training issues and gaps in innovative ways, contextualised to meet the unique needs of specific sectors and employees. Within the implied critique of ACTA was also the suggestion that a CBT approach alone was not sufficient to encourage the development of these new capacities.
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