Industry Consultation / Who

Consultation is a design input, not a document to produce

It is required, so it gets produced. Produced as a record it changes nothing, and the difference between the two is visible to anybody who reads the file.

Almost every education and training framework requires providers to consult industry, and almost every provider can produce evidence that they did. There are attendance lists, letters of support, survey summaries and minutes of advisory meetings. The evidence is genuine in the sense that the events occurred. What is frequently absent is any sign that the consultation changed anything, and that absence is what distinguishes a compliance artefact from a design input.

The mechanism by which it becomes an artefact is understandable. The requirement is expressed as an obligation to consult, the assessment of it examines whether consultation occurred, and the cheapest way to satisfy an obligation to do something is to do the smallest version of it that generates a record. A meeting is held, attendance is captured, and the minutes note that the course was discussed and supported. Every element of the requirement has been met and nothing has been learned.

Consultation that works looks different in one specific respect: it produces disagreement. When somebody who employs graduates is genuinely asked what is wrong with them, they say something, and what they say is usually uncomfortable. Graduates cannot write a report anybody can act on. They have never seen the equipment that is actually used. They have been assessed on a process the industry abandoned four years ago. They arrive expecting a role that does not exist. Every one of those is a useful finding and none of them appears in a supportive letter.

Which points at the second common failure, which is who gets asked. Consultation naturally reaches the people who are easy to reach: existing partners, board members, the association that represents the sector, and employers who already take placements. These are legitimate participants and they share a characteristic, which is that they are already engaged and broadly favourable. The employers who stopped taking your graduates, who never considered them, or who have a poor view are the ones with the information you do not have, and they are the ones nobody contacts.

The third failure is timing. Consultation conducted after a course is designed, to validate it, is a review rather than a design input, and there is very little a participant can say at that stage that will change anything. Everybody involved understands this, which is why the responses are agreeable. Consultation early, when the shape of the thing is still open, produces different conversations because the participants can see that their answers matter.

The fourth is that industry gets asked repeatedly by many providers, in overlapping ways, usually by survey, and the response rate falls accordingly. A local employer of any size may receive requests from several providers a year, each asking broadly similar questions, none of which visibly produced anything. Consultation fatigue is a real and rational response, and the providers who still get good engagement are generally the ones who gave something back.

The practical shape of doing this well is therefore not more consultation but different consultation: fewer, longer conversations with people who have something to say including something critical, held early enough to matter, with the loop visibly closed afterwards. That produces both a better course and a much stronger record than any quantity of surveys.

A final observation about why this is worth getting right beyond the requirement. A provider with genuine industry relationships has access to things that cannot be bought: placements when capacity is tight, people willing to speak to students, advance notice of what is changing, and employers who will hire a graduate on the provider's recommendation. Those relationships are built by being useful to the other party over years, and they are the difference between a provider that is part of an industry and one that supplies to it. The compliance requirement is the smallest reason to do this properly.