Commonwealth Forests

bullet1 Chapter 5 Training at professional and technical levels

bullet2 CONCLUSIONS

Although remedies and opportunities will vary from place to place, situation to situation, there are three areas currently of particular importance for technical forestry education.

1.  Role and Function.    Technical Forestry Schools, no matter how set up, derive their function from the forest policy of the country.  Their role is to provide competent staff to meet the current (and immediate future) needs of the forestry sector as determined by the strategies and objectives adopted. Where these are clear then the courses run by the Institutions can be sharply focussed, where woolly the curricula will be vague.  To provide leadership in this either a national Forestry Education and Training Board (or equivalent), or a local Forestry Advisory Panel, might exist.   

2.  Establishing competence based curricula.  This is a must at technical and practical skill levels.

Since competent staff are required then competence based teaching and assessment is required.  A top down approach may be followed;

  1. Step 1.  The forest industry, public and private, defines the levels of staff they require and the jobs they do (in broad terms)  

  2. Step 2.  The broad terms need to be broken down into categories; technical, supervisory, managerial etc.

  3. Step 3.  The elements of each job need to be decided.

  4. Step 4.  The assessment procedures and standards for each competence/task need to be agreed

3.  A hierarchal approach.   With competence based assessment it is possible to progress up from one level to the next.  These levels can be expressed as

  1. Practical - Operator training (and Certification),

  2. Technical - how operations are carried out,

  3. Supervisory - organising and controlling forest operations,

  4. Managerial - medium to long term planning and organisation control,  

  5. Scientific - investigating improvements.   

As one progresses then the Education percentage of the course will increase.

It is important that institutions provide courses at different levels (how many will depend upon the circumstances) and encourage students to progress from one to another.   Although there are advantages in a single long course, alternatives that provide a mix of short courses, distance learning, computer based activities, video conferencing etc do exist and should be utilised.