• Tanya Bretherton
• National Centre for Vocational Education and Research (NCVER)

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14 October 2011This final report is from a three-year research program that examined the dynamics of workforce development and explored the challenges in maintaining viable labour flows in the child care and meat processing industries.

The paper highlights the lack of receptiveness for workers in the meat processing and childcare sectors to train beyond mandatory levels due to the nature of casualised working arrangements and little reward for upgrading qualifications. Entrenched  cultural factors in the meat industry also undermine the desire of employees to undertake further training, as highlighted by Rafferty and Norton (2010). According to Bretherton, the notion of a vocation, with a supporting 'continuum of skill', is a possible alternative structure. She argues that, a 'vocation' houses or nestles groups of skills in a way that offers the opportunity to develop offshoots of specialisation, but it does not promote skill development as a means for upward mobility in the conventional sense. This notion of a vocation may present both meat processing and child care with a more viable framework on which to structure and understand skill development. Adopting new paradigms of skill development, however, would require significant collective change at the societal, workplace and systemic level, and most certainly at the level of individual'.