Farm employees whose work schedules or remote locations can make it difficult to complete industry training courses have a new option to continue improving their skills and their job prospects.
Thirteen sheep and cattle farm employees from Waikato, East Coast and Wairarapa converged on Turangi recently to learn more about feeding and pastures in a three-day block course. Participants ranged in age from 18 to mid-30s.
The course condensed the theory part of the Agriculture Industry Training Organisation's National Certificate in Agriculture, Level 3 Feeding and Pastures that is normally delivered fortnightly over several months.
"It's important everyone in our industries can make the most of the training their industries support," Agriculture ITO's chief executive Kevin Bryant said.
"Some farming operations are just too busy to have staff away regularly, while others are in geographically isolated areas and can t make the trip to attend fortnightly workshops. Block courses offer an alternative that we think will meet their needs."
Course tutor Richard Parkes from the Open Polytechnic ran the course. "In my experience, having worked with trainees face-to-face and in distance education, the blended delivery model works very well particularly with lower level trainees."
Blended delivery is a mix of distance and face-to-face instruction.
"The trainees don't necessarily want to study completely by distance education and they don't always have a class in their region that they can attend, so to have their learning in one concentrated block works very well for them."
Mr Parkes said the mix of ages and backgrounds was a jackpot as far as learning went.
"You couldn't have asked for a better group of trainees they worked brilliantly. The dynamic was excellent. From my point of view it meant that we could really work well and get into some good stuff," Mr Parkes said.
According to Mr Parkes, the most significant learning outcome for the trainees was learning about soils to grow good pasture that meets good stock production targets.
Sarah Campbell attended the course. She works as a shepherd on the road between Taupo and Napier. Sarah says they have regular on-farm workshops and the course has given her a better understanding of the discussions that take place, especially about pasture management.
"The general knowledge I got about pasture growth and calculating how much to feed your animals per day was good for me because I need to know those things. With the block course, the information's right there and you re concentrating on one thing, not switching between the farm and a course every fortnight," Ms Campbell said.
Dean Hamilton, Head Shepherd on a farm just out of Turangi, said it was good to do his theory in a concentrated way, "I'm doing my Level 4 now and if they offer a block course for that, I'll be doing it. It saves a lot of travelling over six months. It's a cheaper way to do it as well, there's no travelling to workshops every fortnight."
Block courses offer the trainee the opportunity to condense their learning, working with their peers. Then they take that learning back onto the farm to implement it practically. Agriculture ITO training is geared towards linking theory and practice.
Agriculture ITO is New Zealand's leading agricultural vocational training organisation, with over 12,000 people engaged in its national certificate and diploma programmes last year. It is a not-for-profit organisation supported by industry funding through DairyNZ and Meat and Wool New Zealand.
The next block course is the National Certificate in Agriculture Level 3 Breeding which will be held in Taupo in late July / early August. The course will run over four days and three nights. |
