Rail skills training and assessment is often tailored to the rail organisation, railway network and geographic location. This includes entry level rail skills training and assessment. There are examples of training and assessment that have been highly contextualised to meet an organisation’s local product and domain needs which then restricts the transferability to other networks. As a result, there is limited mutual recognition of the existing skills and training of rail workers.
For workers, the absence of mutual recognition hinders their ability to move between employers and presents a barrier to entry into the sector.
For employers, the absence of mutual recognition means that they are required to retrain workers because there is no clear separation of common skills and knowledge from local product and domain skills and knowledge.
To reduce training time and costs for Australia’s rail transport operators, the National Transport Commission (NTC) developed a Blueprint for mutual recognition of nationally recognised entry level rail skills training. The Blueprint report gathered insights from industry, education sector stakeholders, and regulators through collaborative workshops. The Blueprint outlined five steps to achieve mutual recognition of entry-level rail competencies across Australia.
The blueprint analysed over thirty (30) rail career pathways to identify common units of study. This analysis identified two (2) core entry-level skill sets comprised of nine (9) associated Units of Competency:
- TLISS00128 Rail Infrastructure Induction Skill Set
- TLISS00224 Rail Operations Fundamentals Skill Set
