What Indigenous employees value in a business training programme: implications for training design and government policies

ABSTRACT

Indigenous people tend to pursue education in their mature age. Indigenous employees thus, may need additional training opportunities in the workplace. As their preferred way of learning are different from other employees, training programmes for Indigenous employees should be designed and delivered with their preferred ways of learning in mind. In this article, we analyse what Indigenous employees working in health services in rural and regional Australia value in a business training provided by a private vocational education and training (VET) provider. The training programme attended by Indigenous employees was offered to Indigenous employees only. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews with the graduates of the programme identifies key aspects of the training that graduates value. This has important implications for engaging Indigenous employees in training programmes through their workplace, and improving design of business training programmes in the Indigenous context. Finally, our findings have implications for government policies and practices in supporting Indigenous training programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Workplace learning
• training design
• Indigenous employees
• health services
• Australia

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The research team was clear at the outset about the purpose of the research and that the findings will be reported to the training provider Bruce Callaghan and Associates and Department of Health with a purpose of informing how the effectiveness of the training program may be improved.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bruce Callaghan and Associates (BCA) funded by the Australian Department of Health.