QUOTE: Up to 19 TAFE campuses across NSW have been earmarked for sale, including several in Sydney, raising concerns about a greater focus on online courses and a shift away from face-to-face learning during a skills shortage.

One minute we read about the need to revitalise training facilities and the next we read that they'll be sold off.

Online courses are okay for theory but most trades need some hands-on, practical teaching and exercises.

And, as we know, if any NSW government can find some public assets to flog off, it will do so at the first opportunity.

GTC there is a gun club in Wagga Wagga they can flog off lol.

My father was fond of saying that, regardless of who you vote for, you end up with a politician and that he wouldn't feed a politician.

The NSW Technical and Further Education Commission once held the title of the world's largest tertiary educational institution and a fine one it was too. It introduced me to the electrical trade. The unfortunate thing was that it has always been underfunded and to the point where the teachers used their off hours to make up equipment like racks of resistors, capacitors, inductors and test equipment so the attending apprentices could undergo the practical portions of the trade course. Without that dogged determination and commitment, much of what TAFE has produced in the way of tradesmen could not have taken place. It was a credit to everyone involved and it was a state-wide initiative.

When TAFE fees were introduced and then with the Commission being subject to private competition, it did wreck things. I've lost count of the privately owned colleges that have either handed out certificates and diplomas like gift cards or have gone belly-up, leaving students without a way to complete their studies or get their fees refunded.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Sadly this is just more of the same stupidity from the pollies and their minders/consultants (not necessarily the public service heads) who have no idea what it takes to train someone to the point that they can actually do a technical job effectively and safely. In the past there were many places such as the state railway workshops, PMG training schools, school of mines, vehicle and other heavy engineering manufacturers besides the TAFE where trade and technical training was excellent. There was also the armed services that took apprentices if you were prepared to wear a uniform.

Now that is all gone because as any consultant will tell you, it is better to bring someone from overseas on a visa and anyway there are no Australians who have the essential skills/experience. In my time in public service middle management it was relatively easy to justify hiring a contractor from a 'body shop' for a project but near impossible to get approval to create a new permanent position and recruit a suitable Australian to fill it. The going rate for a contractor was usually three times what someone in a permanent position was paid but money for contractors could be hidden it the project costs and departments/agencies were under under constant pressure to minimise staffing levels. The other thing that they just couldn't comprehend was that costs didn't stop once a project was implemented; it had to be maintained once the contractor had gone and that required permanent staff with appropriate skills and experience.

Like many who contribute to this forum, I went through the TAFE system. I also had previous radio, radar and computer training in the Army. I also completed many industry IT courses (fortunately at my employer's expense). Quite frankly the standard of instruction in the Army and TAFE was far superior to anything I found on industry courses. Despite successfully implementing several IT projects (and winning an award for the result) I was finally forced out of the public service when I turned 55 and deemed to be too old to work in IT. (The excuse was that I did not hold a uni degree in anything; the subject was irrelevant. When I queried that, I was told that a degree was essential to do the job that I had been doing for over 25 years. I was replaced by a contractor who I was expected to train before I left; unfortunately I went down with an unidentifiable lurgy and had to take all my accumulated sick leave.)

As described in another post, in my retirement out of curiosity I paid to do a two day Test & Tag course plus the extra bit on how to fit a 3-pin plug. The standard of instruction was very poor. However like all the others who attended, I now have a certificate that allows me to legally fit a plug anywhere in Australia; it was good that I already knew all I needed for the practical 'assessment' because I would not have learnt anything about doing it correctly on the course. Not to worry because we know that industry run courses are far superior to anything TAFE could do.

I once had an employee sent to do a test-tag course. It wasn't at a tech college but he did pass, except for one very annoying thing - he came back to work and requested dozens of boxes of three pin plug tops. I asked why he needed those and he said that on the course it included instructions to automatically replace any plug that wasn't clear and didn't include insulation on the two hot pins.

I stated at the time that it was not necessary to replace a plug top unless an existing one was damaged but he was certain that he'd been told that all plugs not fitting the described category were to be replaced no matter what. I am not sure whether his instructor had shares in Clipsal or he just misunderstood the curriculum but a heated argument ensued which almost resulted in his dismissal because this bloke had proven numerous times to be an argumentitve and obnoxious git.

Whilst it is true that in a commercial or industrial situation, that any plug replaced must have a clear shroud and have insulated pins, it is not necessary to replace a perfectly safe existing plug top. He ended up resigning due to continuing ill-health a short time later and he wasn't missed. I wasted hundreds of dollars sending this bloke on that course and despite him being ex-British Army he just didn't fit in on my crew. Rather than extolling self-discipline and being prepared to follow orders (I was a bit less strict than the military would have been!) he ended up finding it hard to settle in and seemed to have a superiority complex. He also lied at his interview about the state of his health. He managed to hide his wonky knees at the medical I sent him to and spent about half the time he was with us walking around with a cane.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Yes Brad according to what I was 'taught' on my course, any and all plugs and sockets on an extension cord used in an industrial setting MUST have clear covers so the (untrained) user can see if they are safe. Also any cord bought at the likes of Bunnings is inherently unsafe if it has moulded opaque covers.

The very clear trend with government in Australia, if not elsewhere, is that it no longer sees itself as needing or wanting to actually operate anything. Rather, it wants to simply create red tape and collect the associated fees.

If it can sell or outsource a function, it will, washing its hands of the outcome in the process.

As for Test & Tag, as I've said before, in all the years it has been in operation, the only time I ever saw it acted on was when an old single bar radiator's cord was cut off. Said radiator used to sit under a middle-aged secretary's desk. Everything else was simply tagged.

All of the office equipment (computers, printers, photocopiers, etc) was leased and replaced when 3 to 5 years old.

Talk about money for jam.

As for that goose (Dicky Knees?) who wanted to replace all of the plug tops, I would have assigned him to a task that he was probably more qualified for -- such as minding my car space.

In most settings, moulded plugs of any colour are fine, as the factory the cord is made in is expected to follow rules that many a layman either doesn't know or doesn't care about - or at least that's how the law sees it. At work, medical equipment is a different story and such items must be fitted with an orange flex that has the plug top and IEC plug as you described - translucent as opposed to transparent. Some plugs are clearer than others.

The thing with manually fitted plug tops is that it is possible to see the wiring without a transparent shroud - the front of the plug shows the single-insulated conductors - clearly showing the colour of the insulation. Unless deliberately booby-trapped, it would be next to impossible for the conductors to pass these inspection holes correctly and still be incorrectly connected.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

As Relay Automatic noted the current training of many is severely lacking. When Telstra more or less dispensed with its In House training of new recruits the newbies were required to do On Line learning which was an absolute joke. The smarter ones soon worked out that when they did their On Line assessments and they were marked Incorrect for some sections they simply went away and studied a bit more to a degree where they could provide the "correct" answer.
So repeating the On Line test many times until they ultimately so called "Passed" and were duly declared Competent....what a joke as in most cases they did not understand how to apply what they supposedly had learnt.

One bloke I had in my group made about 7 attempts to become Competent but had absolutely NO Idea as to how to apply Ohms Law. So once he was declared a Technician and we had a heap of relay sets to be made up he was allocated the task of building them which became rather frightening as he was constantly sitting off Fuse Alarms when he went to test his work.

The bench he was using was fitted with a 3 Amp fuse (50V) and every now and then there would come splat and off would go the Fuse Alarm from the rack that fed his workbench.
First attempt he simply replaced the fuse with another 3A fuse and repeated his test of his relay set....another SPLAT and alarm bells went off again. The highest rating fuse available was 5A so in went one of them and yet another SPLAT.
He figured that there must be something wrong with the fuses so fashioned his own from a piece of bare wire of the same size as he was using in wiring the really set and as it did NOT have the tiny crimped on end pieces that all Cross Bar fuses came with he simply wrapped the wire around the lugs of the fuse strip (odd looking things that came in sections of 5 fuses that each fuses was held in place by the crimped on end beads to hold the fuse under spring tension).

The Rack Fuse feeding all these smaller fuses in this case was a 20A fuse and when he again attempted to test his work and even BIGGER Splat occurred taking out the Rack Fuse and creating some issues in the place when particular circuits suddenly stopped working due to the Rack Fuse blowing.
Besides blowing the Rack fuse the wire he had used to create HIS Fuse was NOT a good contact with the spring loaded lugs and before the Rack Fuse ruptured where he had wrapped his wire around had arced quite a lot and more or less rendered that Fuse position USELESS.

The circuit called for some relay coils of 1000 ohms and he had selected from the store a bundle of 10 Ohm coils so at 50V 5A would flow through each coil. He had absolutely NO idea that 10 Ohm was vastly different to a 1000 ohm coil...a relay coil was a relay coil to him and the 10 and 1000 figures meant nothing to him.

So much for his On Line training . !!! Competent my foot.

When we looked at the size wire he was using we knew from experience that we could use that gauge wire to handle 30A comfortably in many of the wired fuses elsewhere in the exchange.

When I was at Port Hedland Mount Newman Mining had an excellent Apprenticeship scheme going and their people were very well trained. BHP took over Mt Newman Mining and their first move was to disband their In House training and then about 20 years later they suddenly had difficulty sourcing suitable trained workers and NOW have re-instated their Apprentice Training schemes.

So taking TAFE out of NSW could be a retrograde step as none of the private providers produce well trained staff.

so fashioned his own from a piece of bare wire

Reminds me of the Federation house I bought in the 1980s. One of the porcelain fuses contained a paper clip. The fuse holder itself was almost copper plated from the number of times fuses had blown in it.

The next door neighbour told me that the old duck who had lived (and died) there would habitually have bar radiators on in just about every room. I guess she got sick of those pesky fuses blowing and figured out how to 'fix' that problem.

The guy you describe reminds me of the 457 visa jokes who installed the NBN at my house. Only one could speak English and he was a thick as the proverbial brick. These guys would think that 'ohmslaw' was some kind of salad.

I'd day most these days do not get adequately tought the difference between resistance and impedance or that coils will tolerate AC better than DC or that a transformer will not convert or invert DC, and a whole plethora of other little-known secrets outside the trade. At any voltage, 10Ω is almost a dead short but especially so at lower voltages.

One of the first things we learned in our trade course was to ascertain as to why a fuse blows. If there is still wire on the block, the fuse would have blown due to a small overload. If there is nothing left, it's due to a short circuit.

I dare day that there's many now who don't realise that, for example, a 20A fuse on a household power circuit is designed so that it runs hot at its full rated load. Many would think the fuse was faulty because the block was warm or hot but if the fuse isn't a dark orange colour at 20A it certainly will not blow at 21A. There would still be many homes around Australia which have their original Federal or Rowco package boards in place with rewireable fuses on porcellain blocks and probably also not have an RCD in place.

If today's apprentices aren't exposed to the old ways, they will not know how to deal with faults arising from them. Apprentices who serve their time on building sites in the capital cities, roughing in skyscrapers will be at a clear disadvantage here. Whilst they will get a better taste of control circuits and ELV installations such as access control and CCTV systems, they will miss out on valuable problem-solving experience. Training has to be as wide-ranging as possible - with the retirement age now at 67 years, a typical career in the electrical trade will last for around 50 years. That is a long time when training has been limited to a few aspects of the job.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Relayautomatic this reminds me of the time I had to travel around the countryside replacing all the 1200 amp fuses in the 600 amp cabling in the new repeater huts that were mass produced in Villawood in the mid eighties lol.
Yep they employed monkeys off the street in those days as well.

1200A fuses and 600A cabling? That would have been an interesting mix when running at full load...

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

And wearing my QA and systems testing hat, I would have to ask why this was not found by batch sampling during production or during acceptance checking prior to dispatch? Could it be that Telecom didn't have anyone qualified/trained to do what was still required procedure then?