Antebellum have been involved in various areas of Australia’s national training system but most notably, one of our senior consultants was brought into look at the strategic options available to ensure that the national training system was meeting the needs of the users and to align the fragmentation that was occurring between the states and territories and the Commonwealth.

The National Training System is delivered on the ground by the individual states and territories and the various attempts at nationally designed and recognised training have had mixed success over the years. At a critical juncture, the Commonwealth government decided to try and bring some cohesion to the national training system to allow a better consistency, uptake, completion rate and recognition to the training sector. As part of this process the ICT systems to support this initiative were critical to the delivery that the Commonwealth had asked for.

Developing a multi-stage approach to analysing this sector involved setting up Governance structures including Reference Groups and bringing in the main players within the sector to workshops to understand what systems and services were available, who was responsible for what information and what gaps there were for the users. This approach involved a large stakeholder management component as there is always tensions between the states and territories and the Commonwealth across lots of areas, not just politics and funding.

After a lot of analysis involving our core team, a strategy was put to the Governance structures to achieve the desired results. Over 3 years a multi stage strategy would bring together the initial contact point for the sector nationally, a definitive source of truth for all training materials including new tools for completion and recognition and a large repository for training materials to support the national training system. Underpinning this strategy was a technical initiatives for data interoperability, platforms to reduce excessive licencing costs and the decommissioning of redundant or duplicated data sources or services.

These initiatives involving all states and territories and the Commonwealth government are never easy, so stakeholder engagement and negotiation played a large part in the success of the Program. Once Business Cases and funding was secured, the initiate was established under an MSP based Program and the individual projects, work packages and other initiatives planned and scheduled in their respective sequence. Antebellum then acted as the Program Director with other specialist resources in Business analyst and Organisation Change roles.

The initial tranche of the Program was successful delivering the key building blocks across the system with the first 2 major projects delivered. Unfortunately the Commonwealth Government disbanded the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA) and moved all of their service delivery to the the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training and as politics generally does, the Program was not continued and the national training system has struggled since for a sense of national identity and usability.

Antebellum were proud to be part of such a complex and distributed Program and designed and executed a Program of work that was cost effective, measurable, evidence based and traceable along its delivery stages against both strategy and requirements.