By now you will have heard about the new My Skills website but what does it really offer you as an RTO and what are aXcelerate’s plans for integration?
The My Skills website provides a means for students and employers to connect with training organisations/RTOs that best suit their needs. In principle, the site serves as a hub of training-related data and information: RTO course offerings, case studies, statistics and links to other useful sites that a prospective VET student might find relevant, such as employment directories. My Skills may also be used to find potential financial assistance available to undertake desired training.
My Skills is a derivative of the My School web site, an initiative first launched by the Gillard administration in January 2010 that compiles the profiles of nearly 10,000 Australian schools, allowing site visitors to browse statistical and contextual information by location, sector or name. It was enacted as a bid by the government to monitor school performance and statistics across Australia, and the operation has now extended to also include the VET sector—hence My Skills.
Pulling all its core data directly from www.training.gov.au (the ‘Master List’ of RTOs in Australia), My Skills is a convenient tool for cursory research, but it does have some limitations. For example, users can pull up courses and qualifications offered by an RTO, but the site can’t provide more extensive information such as how many units per course, how each course is structured, RPL options, etc. RTOs have the option of manually updating their respective profiles to include more details, but considering how often courses and course descriptions change, it could be a challenge keeping the My Skills account maintained.
For our aXcelerate clients, though, we have good news: our developers are planning to extend the existing functionality of our web service API to enable RTOs to maintain their core course content information in aXcelerate and upload/update that information directly to their My Skills profile. We will be leveraging the existing functionality that aXcelerate already offers clients who have taken advantage of our web site integration feature. For a working example of the aXcelerate Website Integration feature, see our fictional RTO website: Ultimate Training College
Through the My Skills profile, you currently have the ability to list the following information:
- What courses you offer including a summary and full outline page (up to 4,000 characters
- Whether your courses have ‘streams’ (different versions of the same course)
- What modes of delivery do you offer (e.g. Face-to-face, Offsite, Flexible or Mixed mode)
- When your courses are offered/enrolment periods
- What campuses your courses are offered at (for multi-campus RTOs)
- How to enrol with a direct URL link to your enrolment page for that course on your website (if you have aXcelerate website integration it may be possible to create a direct link to your course enrolment page on your website OR at the very least, a link to your generic enrolment page if you do not have course-specific online enrolments
- And much more…
Our initial plan for integration with the My Skills website is to provide web service updates for the most common content that an RTO will need to maintain including basic course information such as course/program names and codes, summary information, full outline text, delivery mode and enrolment periods. Over time, we will extend the web services of aXcelerate to provide even more information to the My Skills RTO profile based on the feedback that we receive from our clients.
As we begin the process of developing this new service we will let you know of our progress and seek your involvement during the testing phase. We look forward to making life easier for you in this increasingly ‘systems-integrated-and-connected’ world!