Information for Learners and Employers

The Professional Development series can come to you! If different youth organisations in a region are willing to work together to enrol a group of learners (minimum of 12), we can offer a course in your area.

Each course is made up of a series of one or two day workshops. The workshops can be scheduled to suit your organisation.

We aim to make each workshop a practical, interactive and enjoyable learning experience that will help to build your team as well as helping them learn new stuff. The workshops are facilitated by qualified and experienced practitioners.

Each workshop is based around a single unit standard. If one of your youth workers already holds that standard (or an equivalent), they don’t need to complete that workshop. If your youth worker is enrolled in a Professional Development course, we will help them do an RPL[1] application to use what they have already done to gain credit towards the qualification. .

Each workshop is followed up by a series of small cluster group meetings, to help participants process the learning from the workshop and apply it to what they are doing. The groups can be anything from 3 to 6 people in size. Each meeting lasts for an hour and they can be scheduled to suit each group. They can be run ‘in house’ by your organisation if you have enough people.

We have a small putea (fund) to put towards the person facilitating each cluster group, this can be a person within the cluster group, or another local person who already has qualifications and/or experience in the subject area. Please make the workshop facilitator aware if you have a person who can do this role.

Each workshop will include some reading and (mainly) practical assignments, these are designed to help each learner reflect on what they are learning and gain academic credit for it. Each cluster group will work together on the assignments, and support each other to get the work done.

 

[1] Recognition of Prior Learning. The process may involve an assessment of current competency in the subject area.