New partnership for improving workforce capability

MEDIA RELEASE

19 June 2014: The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and Dr John Mitchell of John Mitchell and Associates (JMA) are joining forces to deliver workforce capability measures to identify and grow staff capability and increase organisational performance in Australian knowledge-based and service-oriented organisations.

Following three years of close collaboration, Dr Mitchell and his team will join with ACER to operate and further develop the JMA Analytics suite of capability analysis tools (CATs).

“Our focus has always been about understanding and addressing the needs of our clients,” said Dr Mitchell. “Our partnership with ACER will allow us to continue that focus, building enhanced services and ensuring long-term support through ACER’s national network of offices and with the full support of ACER’s world-class assessment, psychometrics and reporting capacity.”

Mr Ralph Saubern, Director of ACER’s Professional Resources division, said the partnership will build on the existing collaboration in which ACER has provided data analysis and psychometric services to support the development of the JMA Analytics tools.

“ACER’s mission is to create and promote research-based knowledge, products and services to improve learning across the life span,” said Mr Saubern. “One aspect of that is supporting organisations by providing evidence-based tools that allow them to target improvements in organisational practice.

“Our partnership will allow more organisations across Australia to better understand the capabilities of their workforce, identify developmental needs, and design and monitor new strategies to meet their challenges and achieve success.”

Dr Mitchell noted that one aim of the partnership is to increase the capacity to support clients from outside the public VET sector, drawing on ACER’s core strengths in collecting and analysing high-quality data, and helping decision-makers to use that data to understand the situation, set goals and drive improvements.

“ACER has a long history of working with government services, higher education institutions, TAFEs, private RTOs and of course the schools sector – all sectors in which we are seeing increasing demand for the CATs,” Dr Mitchell said.

“Ultimately the beneficiaries of this partnership will be our existing clients and the many more organisations that will now have access to the evidence-based tools that they need to drive improvement.”

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Media enquiries: Steve Holden, 03 9277 5582 or 0419 340 058 communications@acer.edu.au