The endless training and retraining merry go round

I am pausing in my reminiscences about travelling Australia to have a rant about an email that I  recently received.  I had only gotten around to reading it yesterday and the thoughts and opinions that I have about it are bouncing around in my head.  I'm sure it will help if I set them out here as it is a subject that I have touched on before.

This is the email:

Hi Emma,
I  hope that you and your family are all well.

Training Admin at Head Office have asked me to let you know that you will need to upgrade to the NAT10006 Cert IV in BE Counselling and NAT10007 (Community) in order to be able to train and assess, once back from maternity leave. It doesn't take long to do :-)

I wondered if you would like to have a chat about it?
Best wishes,


Now firstly, I haven't replied yet or found out what this is all about and whether everyone has to upgrade to the new qualification, or it's just me because of my maternity leave. But either way it's still feeding into this mentality that is prevailing at the moment of training, more training and constant upgrading of qualifications.  I have written before about this need to stay current and the onus that this then places on women to stay connected to the workforce.

This email was sent to me not from an employer, but from a volunteer organisation that I have been involved with for 17 years.  For more than 15 of those years I have been actively involved as a volunteer breastfeeding counsellor.  I went through an extensive 12 month training course to gain the necessary skills and knowledge in order to gain the qualification.  As well as counselling 100's and 100's of women over the ensuing years, a requirement has always been to keep up to date with changing information and so to engage in self education.  This I have happily done as it is a particular area of interest for me.  Plus, I was in the process of having babies which greatly reinforced, and often upgraded pre-existing knowledge and skills.

Fast forward a number of years and the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) became a registered training organisation (RTO) and had to not only total rewrite all of their training programmes but had to fall into step with a whole new bureaucratic way of doing things in order to satisfy the requirements of being an RTO.  So I retrained as a breastfeeding counsellor and community educator through a complicated process of recognition of prior learning.  I also went on and trained as a trainer and assessor.  I had only recently at that point trained as an assessor with the association under their old scheme and had to go and retrain in order to fit in with their new framework.  That was the fun and games I engaged in at the end of my Australian trip through 2008 and 2009.  After jumping through the various hoops and settling down to the business of actually doing some volunteer work for the association I found that I needed to upgrade my training and assessment qualifications again!  It seems that there is constant review happening and everything needs to be upgraded every five years as a matter of course. I started to feel like I was spending more of my 'volunteer' hours jumping through administrative hoops than actually at the coal face helping mothers.  Each year required a complicated appraisal of the experience and skills that were utilised during the preceding year and a requirement to reapply for the position of counsellor and trainer and assessor.  It was all enough to make you want to bang your head against the wall. 

This year, partly as an excuse to just leave the whole thing behind and have a break from it all, I decided to take 12 months leave to just enjoy being a mum with my beautiful new born baby girl.  ABA has not respected my leave and I have been asked to help here, answer questions there, fill in reports and field endless requests about when will I be coming back. So far I've only been on leave for 10 months.  Already I have been thinking that at the end of my twelve months I shall
resign as trainer and assessor and counsellor, and just go back to being a member.  I still really believe in the association and what it stands for, but feel that it has allowed itself to get derailed by its adherence to this governmental paradigm.  I have heard that the association is some millions of dollars in the red, and with the need to spend so much of its time and money satisfying regulatory requirements instead of doing their core business of providing information and support to breastfeeding mothers, I find myself not surprised.



It saddens me that a women's organisation like ABA whose soul goal is to improve women's ability to breastfeed their babies would allow themselves to be corrupted by a system that is actively discriminating against women and disadvantaging them if they take even a short amount of time off work. It feels to me like they are just following lock step with a new dogma without assessing how this affects not only the women working for them but also the message it is reinforcing across society.  As a women's organisation we should be standing up and pushing back against this insidious incursion of our rights.  Women should be allowed to take a reasonable amount of time off work (paid employment or volunteer) and by reasonable I mean years if necessary, and not expect to be treated like some out of touch imbecile with the memory of a gnat.  Being current in qualifications up to the last second is not only ridiculous, but insulting. Humans have the intelligence to being able to grow and develop and hone skills without the need for a training organisation or regulatory authority to sign off on their supposed competence.  The idea that ticking boxes is somehow indicative of a person's worth is a sad joke.  When we take time off work to raise our babies, our brains do not atrophy.  We often still have cause to think about work, through just the natural reminiscences of past life, reading the journals that still come through our mail and email inboxes, reading relevant articles in the newspaper and just generally being connected to the outside world by being fully functional and normal intelligent human beings.  The current system seems unable or unwilling to recognise this fact unless you prove it in triplicate by filling in a convoluted series of forms that sets out against very specific criteria just how each piece of knowledge and experience fits into a predetermined matrix written in training goobly gook.



What I find most ironic about the ABA's need for me to upgrade my qualifications, is that while I have been on leave I have actually been doing the very thing that I have to prove that I have the skills and knowledge about.  For the past 10 months I have been breastfeeding my baby every single day, sometimes it's felt like 24/7.  I have, through personal, real life experience, managed the newborn days, the supply issues, the managing paid work, expressing, the teething, the introduction of food and all the other issues surrounding a baby.  This is the stuff that we work in and train mothers in as a part of our volunteer work.  Surely to actually be doing all of this in practice should knock any theoretical training course right out of the water.  Logic says it would, but logic and bureaucracy don't seem to exist in the same bubble.  We have our heads so far in the sand that we can't see the illogical consequences of this. Particularly in a volunteer organisation where there is no paid incentive to be made to jump through these hoops.  At work, you cop, to a certain degree, the madness because they are paying for it and for you.  A volunteer organisation is getting your goodwill and time gratis.



I really hope that this madness will end and there will be a collective realisation at some point very soon that this training and assessment regime is completely unsustainable as it is costing way too much money and it is leaking good quality people, who are fed up with the system, from the association.