Australia has national standards and qualifications for rail skills, but these alone are not enough to build the mobile rail workforce Australia needs.
That was the clear message from rail leaders at the National Transport Commission’s (NTC) recent Future Rail Skills Forum in Sydney, where the spotlight was on the need for a truly national approach to rail education and training.
“We have national units of competency and national qualifications, but what we do in rail is build the curriculum within our own organisations,” said Australasian Railway Association General Manager Workforce Development Fiona Love.
“It’s so bled into the specifics of an employer group that you can’t take that (qualification) somewhere else. Rail is the biggest user of skill sets in the country. And we need to build generic curriculum.
“But who is that we? And where does that sit?”
Right now, Industry Skills Australia (ISA), the Jobs and Skills Council for the rail sector, develops the units of competency (skills standards) that underpin nationally accredited qualifications. Curriculum design and training delivery are the responsibility of training providers, ISA CEO Paul Walsh told the forum.
“It gives them the opportunity to contextualise training delivery in a way that suits their industry stakeholders. For enterprise providers it allows them to create training that suits their specific needs.”
The model worked in the past when Australia’s railways operated as a bunch of individual state networks. But as rail has become more integrated, it’s no longer fit for purpose, said NTC Chair Carolyn Walsh.
Walsh referred to a presentation from leaders of the European Rail Skills Alliance, Angela Di Febbraro and Matthias Rohrmann, who spoke about a focus on developing a “European mindset” to foster cross-border collaboration around competencies.
“In Australia, I don’t think we have an Australian mindset,” Walsh said. “That is culturally something that we’ve really got to shift.”
The NTC’s Future Rail Skills Forums bring together transport and skills leaders from Australia and overseas to grow rail’s skills base and find better ways to address long-standing workforce challenges in the sector.
As rail becomes more digitised, forum speakers stressed the need for a national workforce that is flexible, future-ready, and supported by consistent training approaches across jurisdictions. This requires greater partnerships between governments, industry and education.
They noted the benefits of artificial intelligence when used as a tool to assist with tasks like maintenance, timetabling and training of staff, and highlighted the rapid changes that are occurring across the sector, making digital skills, change management and data analytics more important than ever before.
Forum participants also emphasised the need to:
“We’re seeing a sea change very quickly in rail in Australia as people recognise the need for a united mindset and it’s happening at a national level,” Walsh said. “People realise we still have eight different rail infrastructure managers on the standards gauge network and they don’t talk to each other.
“They don’t work together to simplify network rules and they’re not thinking about single rules books or training programs. This goes to the safety of the workers on those networks creating bigger task loads and human factor issues.”
Encouragingly, national rail reform is gaining support. Walsh said that right now the NTC’s work is backed by numerous transport ministers, all secretaries of transport departments, the head of the Office of the National Rail Regulator, as well as the Rail Industry Safety and Standards Board, which recognises it will need to evolve to play a stronger role in the rail standard setting space.
“We’ve also had a Rail Safety National Law (RSNL) review which has said it would gazette the National Network of Interoperability and put in regulatory hooks giving incentives for railways to finally cooperate and work together.”
Proposed changes to the RSNL will also include governance arrangements that will provide assurance to ONRSR around any new investments, such as digital systems, that are compliant with the mandated standards.
The Future Rail Skills Forums are an important part of the National Rail Action Plan to create a simpler, safer more competitive rail system.
You can find out more about this work on the NTC website.
