Advisory groups that do something

Most meet, receive an update, and disperse.

An industry advisory group typically meets a few times a year, receives a report on enrolments and course changes, is asked whether it has any comments, and closes. Members attend from goodwill and the meeting produces nothing because nothing was asked of it.

Groups that work are given a task. Review this assessment task and tell us whether it resembles real work. Look at this list of what we teach and tell us what is missing. Help us decide between these two options. A task produces engagement in a way an update does not.

Membership needs to turn over. A group that has met for eight years with the same people has become a social arrangement, and its members have absorbed the provider's assumptions to the point of no longer noticing them. Staggered terms solve it without anybody being asked to leave.

Attendance is the diagnostic. A group whose attendance declines is not disengaged industry; it is a meeting that is not worth the morning, and the response should be to change what happens at it rather than to send more reminders.

The other structural fix for advisory groups is to give them something to decide rather than only something to review. A group asked to choose between two genuine options, and told that its choice will be implemented, behaves entirely differently from one asked for comment on a decision already made.