What the New Training Package Organising Framework Means and How Experience Shows the Way
Australia talks a lot about productivity but rarely in ways that connect clearly to the workplace, skills, qualifications or what businesses actually experience day to day. Productivity is often described through economic measures, but for employers it is fundamentally about capability, skills, performance, technology uptake, service quality, targets, performance and the ability of people to adapt as jobs evolve.
This is where the national skills system, the VET sector, qualifications reform, and workforce development all intersect. Australia’s new Training Package Organising Framework (effective 1 July 2025), along with broader VET Qualification Reform, represents a shift toward a more purpose-led, flexible, and industry-aligned qualifications system. But for these reforms to realise their potential, qualification design must better reflect how work is actually organised today and how it will change in the future.
This is exactly the area where deep expertise is essential. Since 1996 Wendy Perry has worked across the VET system in Australia and internationally, in more than 30 countries, applying units of competency for learning, assessment, training, skills development, qualification design, job profiling and shaping workforce outcomes across many sectors.
This blog brings together the national reforms, the Training Package Organising Framework, and a practical layered cake qualification structure to outline how Australia can strengthen productivity through a future-focused skills system.
Understanding Productivity in Simple and Complex Terms
Productivity in simple terms means creating more value from the same or fewer inputs. For businesses this means better work, better outcomes and better capability without necessarily increasing cost or hours worked.
In more complex economic terms, productivity refers to output per hour worked and includes the combined effects of labour, capital, technology, skills, management and innovation.
Where the national conversation often becomes disconnected from practice is that employers think in terms of skills, people, workloads, job design, service demand, technology adoption and their ability to recruit and retain capable staff. This is why productivity is increasingly recognised as a skills challenge, not only an economic one.
Linking Productivity to Skills, Job Roles and Qualifications
Almost every productivity challenge faced by Australian employers relates to skills. These include:
- Labour and skills shortages
- Inadequate preparation for current or future job roles
- Slow adoption of new technologies
- Outdated job structures
- Inability to shift work as tasks change
- Underdeveloped problem-solving, communication, leadership or digital capability
- Poor job matching and limited skills recognition across sectors
- Compliance or quality failures due to skills gaps and practices
This places qualification design, skills taxonomies, strategic workforce planning and the VET system at the centre of the productivity conversation.
The new VET Qualification Reform from DEWR and the Training Package Organising Framework aim to ensure that qualifications reflect the skills needed in current and future jobs. This includes a shift to purpose-led, outcomes-based qualifications and a more principles-driven approach. However, qualifications still need a design logic that can hold the different forms of capability required for modern job roles.
This is where Wendy Perry’s four-layer cake structure becomes highly relevant.
Four-Layer Cake Qualification and Skills Profile Structure
It is proposed that qualifications or job-role skills profiles should include four interlocking layers:
- Core skills: 21st century literacies such as digital, data, AI awareness, communication, learning agility, collaboration, inclusion capability, critical thinking, teamwork, adaptability and ethical reasoning. These expand beyond ACSF-based foundation skills.
- Functional/Cross sector skills: transferable capabilities like customer service, problem-solving, safety, planning, service orientation, compliance, project management, finance management and systems thinking.
- Industry essential skills: common requirements across an industry such as regulatory standards, WHS, industry practices, tools and technologies, sustainability and quality expectations.
- Industry or job-specific skills: specialist technical skills, licensed tasks, regulatory requirements, role-specific competencies, procedures and technologies.
This layered structure provides a way to design qualifications that are both flexible and practical, ensuring they prepare people for work today while equipping them for evolving roles and technologies. I believe that Qualification template, Appendix C should be adjusted to reflect this structure, and there should be room for access and equity or GEDSI outcomes (Gender, Equity, Disability, Social Inclusion).
Where the Training Package Organising Framework Aligns with This Structure
The TPOF includes several features that supports a layered approach:
- Purpose-led qualifications – The new structure allows qualifications to be shaped around broad outcomes rather than narrow task lists.
- Transferability – The framework aims to reduce duplication and support skills mobility across sectors.
- Industry engagement – Jobs and Skills Councils play a central role in ensuring qualifications reflect industry needs.
- Simplification – The framework supports clearer and more adaptable structures.
- Outcome-based design – Shifting from strict task-mapping enables inclusion of wider capability sets.
These elements create the environment needed to embed core, functional and industry essential layers within qualifications.
Where the Skills System Still Needs Work
Despite these improvements, there are still gaps that the four-layer cake structure helps highlight:
- Foundation skills remain narrow. Current requirements focus on ACSF domains and optional digital literacy. This is too limited for a modern workforce.
- Lack of an explicit functional skills layer. Transferable skills may be inconsistently embedded unless they are explicitly recognised as a separate layer.
- Over-reliance on job-specific skills. The system still naturally leans toward tasks and technical procedures rather than capabilities that drive adaptability and productivity.
- Limited view of future job roles. The framework considers industry input but lacks mechanisms for mapping emerging roles, AI-driven task shifts, green skills or cross-sector transitions.
- The new taxonomy processes remain classification based rather than connected, dynamic and relational. Skills-ontology thinking provides a more future-ready approach.
Why Experience Matters in This Reform Moment
Working since 1996 across nearly every part of the VET system my work includes:
- Designing and delivering units of competency
- Developing qualifications
- Leading workforce development projects
- Linking skills to job outcomes
- Profiling job roles to skills across many sectors (in around an hour per profile)
- Supporting industry, government and providers to align training with workforce need
- Advising internationally in 30+ countries
This extensive experience has given deep insight into how qualifications either support or hinder workforce capability and productivity.
The four-layer cake structure reflects real practice – not just policy ideals, but years of experience applying units of competency to actual workplaces, job roles and skills needs analysis.
Bringing Productivity, Qualification Reform and Workforce Development Together
A modern skills system that supports higher productivity needs to:
- Make core human capabilities visible and assessable
- Embed functional skills that employers rely on every day
- Ensure all industry essential skills are included
- Define and update job-specific skills based on workforce intelligence
- Use skills taxonomies and ontologies that show relationships between skills, tasks and roles, that are globally referenced
- Support training and assessment that can adapt as jobs evolve
- Provide qualifications that are simplified, portable and aligned to labour-market trends
The combination of TPOF, the VET Qualification Reform agenda, industry-led design through Jobs and Skills Councils, and the four layered structure provides a coherent pathway for that shift.
Australia is at a pivotal moment in reforming its VET and skills system. The Training Package Organising Framework, qualifications reform and industry-led design approach create the foundation for a more adaptable, purpose-led and future-focused system.
But achieving the full potential of these reforms requires a clear structure for designing qualifications that reflect how work is actually performed today and how it is changing. Wendy Perry’s four-layer structure provides that structure, grounded in decades of experience across VET, industry, global TVET systems and practical workforce development.
A skills system built on these principles would not only improve qualification relevance, but could lift productivity, support workforce mobility, strengthen capability and ensure Australia’s economy remains competitive in a rapidly changing world.
Let’s show how this works with a real example of the qualifications in Entrepreneurship and New Business.