Australian Vocational Education and Training Management Information Statistical Standard (AVETMISS)

The Australian Vocational Education and Training Management Information Statistical Standard (AVETMISS) is a national data standard to collect and report Vocational Education and Training (VET) data and derive statistics. It collects personal information about workers undertaking VET training such as:

  • Gender
  • Study reason
  • Previous educational achievements
  • Indigenous status
  • Employment status
  • Country of birth
  • Language spoken at home
  • Disabilities
  • Residential and postal address

The White Card course, as a nationally recognised Unit of competency (CPCCWHS1001 - prepare to work safely in the construction industry) falls under this category. As a result, you will have to fill out these details as part of the enrolment process to sign up for the training through a Registered Training Organisation (RTO).

Further to statistical purposes, RTOs that receive national or State funding are also paid by reporting their enrolments, completions, recognition of prior learning etc. through the AVETMISS system on a monthly basis.

AVETMISS reports are a collection of text files (.txt) containing the information listed above. For example, there is a file collecting addresses, a file collecting disabilities, a file collecting previous educational achievements etc. RTO advisors have a technical guide on what the AVETMISS is and how it works.

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Most Learner Management Systems (LMS) commercially available to RTOs will include the option to generate properly formatted AVETMISS reports, using the data collected when creating Student profiles and ongoing updates to training activities.

There are also open source libraries available to generate AVETMISS reports by inputing the data fetched from data sources (mostly LMS databases). Searching for AVETMISS on github returns results for libraries written in Elixir, Ruby, PHP and Python.

AVETMISS history

In November 1990, the Australian ministers responsible for VET committed their agencies to the development and implementation of AVETMISS.

Other parties involved in the implementation of the AVETMISS included:

  • Industry and Skills Council (later known as the Data and Performance Measurement Principal Committee)
  • National Training Statistics Committee
  • National Advisory Committee on Vocational Educational and Training Statistics
  • Australian Committee on Vocational Education and Training Statistics

The first AVETMISS Standard was completed in 1994. It now incorporates various parts of the VET sector.

  • 1994 — publicly funded TAFE and other government providers
  • 1995 — adult and community education (ACE) providers
  • 1996 — publicly funded delivery by other providers
  • 1998 — National VET Financial Data Collection commenced
  • 2005 — National VET in Schools Collection commenced
  • 2014 — National VET Provider Collection extended to all registered training organisations
  • 2014 — National VET in Schools Collection included in the AVETMISS Standard for VET Providers
  • 2017 — National VET Financial Data Collection ceased
  • 2017 — National VET Funding Data Collection commenced

The AVETMISS reports saw many changes over the years, and is now up to version 8. For example, in 2015 Unique Student Identifiers (USIs) were included in the User file and must now be reported by RTOs enrolling learners and delivering training.

National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER)

AVETMISS is run and collected by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVR). They are a independent, not-for-profit organisation responsible for collecting and analysing statistics on the VET sector. The organisation is managed by a board of nine directors with experience across state, territory, and Commonwealth governments, industry, unions and training authorities. They provide statistics and research to a number of stakeholders such as:

  • Ministers
  • Commonwealth and state and territory education and training authorities
  • Registered training organisations
  • VET practitioners and providers
  • Educational institutions
  • Australian businesses
  • Researchers
  • International agencies
  • Industry skills councils
  • Employer- and employee-based associations or organisations
  • Community organisations.
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