Workplace Skills Plan & Annual Training Report: Initial Review

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2020

The Workplace Skills Plan and Annual Training Report: An Initial Review of the Data to Determine a Way Forward

This review argues that a joint effort to address problems of completeness, accuracy, and consistency within the WSP/ATR data will strengthen data quality and enable useful research for skills planning

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Labour Market Intelligence research programme

Summary

The Workplace Skills Plan (WSP) and Annual Training Report (ATR) are important tools for collecting information pertinent to skills planning. However, to date, their full potential has not been realised, and there exists no national-level analysis of this data despite the considerable resources invested in its collection. This report reviews the WSP/ATR data submissions between 2016 and 2018, using three criteria—completeness, accuracy, and consistency—and highlights key concerns relating to their usefulness for national-level analyses. Improving data quality will require a joint effort between the DHET, the SETAs and employers. The report recommends that the DHET should actively engage with the SETAs during the submission process and interrogate the data received. The SETAs, which operate within widely differing contexts in terms of employer numbers and employer capacity, have a critical role in the data collection process and should be supported in learning from each other’s experiences.