Samantha Perkins
View comments from Samantha Perkins, from NZ Motor Industry Training Organisation, taken at the Literacy Forum in Wellington, May 2011.
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Key content
Samantha describes how MITO field staff are key to embedding literacy and numeracy training in the motor industry, and how the literacy and numeracy skills gained in the workplace translate to everyday life.
Transcript
We are embedding everything but we do it organisationally and taking it out to the organisation, so our front line field staff are really engaged with the literacy and numeracy. They’re also our eyes and ears in the workforce, so they’re indentifying literacy and numeracy issues as and when they see them and we’re reacting immediately. Obviously we’re implementing the literacy and numeracy assessment tool from the TEC and we’re using those results to guide our decisions around people’s enrollment. So we’re ensuring people are enrolled in appropriate programs suitable for their literacy and numeracy needs and then making sure that we staircase them so that they can achieve their learning goals.
It is a big deal but it’s not hard, we all need these skills and we all have deficiencies in particular areas, lets work together and strengthen our skills’. Because it’s not just about learning these skills on the job and applying them to the workplace, it’s about learning these skills and applying them to the rest of your life, so it’s sustained learning and taking the literacy and numeracy skills that you’re learning in the workplace and applying it to your everyday life and different settings.
Obviously ITOs have different training models so it’s not a one size fits all approach, it’s very much we have to tailor it to a particular training models. But it is important to learn from each other and identify good practice and really work together because it is a national issue, it’s not specific to the motor industry, it’s not specific to any other industry, it’s a national issue and so the better we work together, the better the outcomes I think.