Job Title and Company : Secretary, Coalition of Celebrant Associations (CoCA) Inc.
State/Province : National Peak Body
Email Address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
To: Silvia Munoz (Senior Researcher and Project Manager)
at SkillsIQ via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
CoCA Comments on the Draft Case for Change: Consumer Engagement via Online & Social Media, including the proposed changes for modernising Training Package products involving:
- an in-depth review of 20 existing Units
- the development of eight (8) new Units
- the development of four (4) new skill sets.
Professional Independent celebrants - for marriage, funeral and other ceremonies / celebrations - operate as sole trader businesses and require computer and IT skills, especially social media skills, to interact with potential clients as a marketing strategy, and for their day-to-day work..
Therefore our association (of 11 associations) supports the SKILLIQ proposal above to do in-depth review of 20 existing Units; the development of eight (8) new Units; and the development of four (4) new skill sets.
Our main reservation relates to "U6 Develop and launch a basic website".
There are many companies offering free templates, hosting for quite professional looking website that can be utilised for very little expensive. So this unit's learning objectives should focus more on:
- accessing the complexity of the website required
- what website is best for the owner to do the majority of the development without needing to pay the developer for small to reasonably large changes. ie free template websites, Content Management System websites using open source software to fully individually designed.
- how to use a template website (such as weebly) to learn basic SEO principles, setting up text and uploading images etc.
For example Weebly.com
Level 1 Less than $50 pa
Purchasing a Domain name (not from Weebly) ie $15 to $20 pa maximum and using a redirect to the free site
Level 2 Less than $200 pa
Purchasing a Domain name from Weebly (free the 1st year) then approx. $20 pa maximum plus a starter hosting plan $120 pa and can sell up to 10 products. https://www.weebly.com/au/pricing
During the last review of our Calebrancy qualification our SMEG prepared a unit on Computer and IT skills (see Appendix A attached) we considered our workforce needed and were told by the Community Services and Health Industry Skills Council that as those were generic skills, we could not include these in our qualification.
Therefore our SMEG produced a paper titled “General assessment guidance - Suggested Approach to Assessment and Evidence Requirements” to encourage RTO’s to give students assessments that required these skills so students would get a better understanding of what would be required in the “on the job”. At that time, social media platforms were not as prominent for our section, but their fast development certainly requires that celebrants are trained and keptup-to-date with these skills.
CoCA has published these on its website in the section for Celebrants on Celebrant Training. ( see Appendix 2)
CoCA is unaware of whether this paper made it into the Companion Volumes for the Qualification.