When Professional Development Fits, TVET Trainers Show Up: Lessons from the DEC-BKI Pilot

Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions face a structural problem. Trainers are preparing learners for roles already being reshaped by AI, yet most have had no structured opportunity to develop their own AI capability.

TVET is known in many countries by different names: What is known as TVET in Australia includes things that around the world might be called polytechnics, community colleges, institutes of technology and trade schools.

Generic professional development designed for corporate or higher education contexts does not map onto the realities of TVET training and assessment. The gap has been widely acknowledged. What has been missing is evidence that the gap can be closed at scale.

A recent Australian pilot with Bendigo Kangan Institute (BKI), facilitated by the Future Skills Organisation's Skills Accelerator-AI and delivered by the Digital Education Council (DEC), offers that evidence.

Across 68 trainers holding an Australian national qualification in Training and Assessment, nine in ten who completed the Digital Education Council's AI Literacy for Trainers course reported increased confidence using AI in their professional practice. 

The completion rate matters as much as the satisfaction scores. The pilot reached a completion rate of 70.6%. Of those who finished, 87.5% rated the programme “good” or “excellent”, 89.6% described it as “relevant” or “extremely relevant” to their role, and half gave a recommendation score of nine or ten out of ten.

What these numbers reveal, beyond the course's effectiveness, is the conditions under which TTVET trainers will engage.

The course runs online asynchronously, with four nominal hours of content and 30 days of access. That format was deliberate. Scheduling constraints and geographic spread have historically limited uptake across the TTVET sector. An asynchronous model removes those barriers without reducing rigour. 

Rather than adapting existing frameworks, DEC built the modules specifically for educators, spanning AI literacy, prompt engineering, critical thinking with AI, and responsible use.

The programme combined the Council's global curriculum with BKI's knowledge of the Australian TTVET context. That grounding allowed it to be tested for local relevance before broader deployment. 

The involvement of the Future Skills Organisation provided alignment with Australia’s rigorous TVET standards and lent the programme credibility within a sector that has good reason to be sceptical of imported frameworks.

"TVET has always been the part of education closest to the labour market. If trainers aren't equipped to work with AI, the learners they teach will enter a workforce they're not prepared for. The consequences of that gap compound quickly," says Danny Bielik, President of the Digital Education Council.

"Many institutions are still framing AI professional development as optional. The BKI results suggest that framing is no longer defensible. Trainers want this and the infrastructure to deliver it exists. What's missing is the institutional will to prioritise it," says Bielik.

For TVET institutions still treating structured AI professional development as optional, the BKI pilot reframes the question. It is no longer whether TVET trainers need structured AI professional development. The question now is how long institutions can justify the delay.