Why Quality and Compliant RTO Training Materials Matter.

Picture the scene, your RTO gets a training enquiry to run a course, and you need to add the unit, qualification or skill set to your scope of registration before you can deliver the training. You head to the internet to find suppliers of the training resources for the course. You are immediately bombarded with enticing offers such as:

‘Cheap RTO resources and materials’
‘Compliant pre-validated training materials $550’
‘Buy one, get one free training and assessment materials’
‘$300 for 10 units of competency’

We get it, the business has got to protect the bottom line. After all, what is the point in running a training company if not to make a profit (non-profit organisations aside)? However, what are those cheap resources really costing you? OK, you save a few hundred dollars on the initial purchase price, but then what? The old adage rings true: “Pay cheap, pay twice.”

You decided to ignore the red flags and went ahead anyway. You receive the zip file with your materials and open them up, and then the reality hits. “Hmmm, these are not very good.” If you are lucky, you’ll get materials that consist of page after page of AI slop. “Why is that lucky?” you ask. Well, at least AI slop will be formatted and use correct grammar and spelling, even if it’s US spelling and grammar, and the same six words are used repeatedly (You know the ones; critical, crucial, relies, involves, helps, and proper), and every single line will have a tricolon triplet group of three examples! (shudder). If you are unlucky, you will get incomprehensible trash written by someone who has never set foot in Australia, let alone ever done the job they are writing about, and whose first language (or even second or third!) is definitely not English.

So, now you are stuck with either nauseatingly repetitive AI slop or content that reads like the author was drunk or having a medical episode while writing it. What are you going to do about it? Unless you don’t care, which, believe it or not, some RTO owners don’t, you are either going to have to rewrite the whole thing line by line and page by page, or write it off as a mistake and look elsewhere for better training resources. Either way, it’s going to cost you. And… all of this is before we discuss the hidden risks and costs of using non-compliant resources!

Non-compliant assessments that do not adequately cover the knowledge evidence, performance evidence, foundation skills, elements and performance criteria, or the assessment requirements of the unit of competency could cost you your status as a Registered Training Organisation. At the very least, it will result in a cancellation of all issued certificates or statements of attainment for the training product in question, and you will probably be made to refund all affected students as well. Oof! That’s going to hurt any RTO, even the big ones. Non-compliant training materials are like a wobbly wheel on a car; sure, you can carry on driving and hope that you get to where you are going, but one of these days, the wheel is going to come off, and the results will be devastating.

OK, so you have your materials. What are you going to do? Can you just live with them and use them anyway? Yes, you could. Should you do that? No, you shouldn’t, because giving substandard resources to your students will only achieve the following.

You’ll look like you don’t care about your training resources.
You’ll look like you don’t care about or respect your students.
You’ll cheapen the reputation of your RTO.

Businesses are built and lost on reputation and reviews. Reviews are even more important today than they’ve ever been. With recent updates in Google’s search algorithm, reviews are seen as one of the key determinants of quality and trust. This includes reviews on your own site and on third-party review sites. A good review can raise your profile and search engine rankings; a bad review can see you not only slapped down the list of results, but also make students avoid your RTO like the plague.

Students care about the quality of the training resources they are given because:

They have paid their hard-earned money for a product and expect and deserve quality content in their Learner Guide and easy-to-follow assessments.
They are often completing assessments at home when they have competing priorities, and they do not have the time to sit alone on a Sunday night wading through page after page of trash, wondering what it all means, while the kids are screaming, the dog is barking, and they have to get up for work in a few hours. They paid to be educated, not inconvenienced!
They do not want to spend an hour working out what the assessment question means before they have to spend even longer trying to answer it.

The result of this scenario for the student will most likely be one of two things: either they will just throw in the towel and give up on the course, or they will try to contact the RTO or their trainer for assistance, often to be met with an answering machine or automatic email informing them that they might get a response in 48 hours.

The result of this scenario for the RTO will also be one of two things: it could lead to a course cancellation and/or a bad review, or it will create additional and unnecessary work for your trainers, which all comes at a cost in terms of time and money. Neither of these things needed to happen.

A training company that knowingly purchases and uses substandard training and assessment materials because they are cheap is like a restaurant knowingly purchasing and using mouldy ingredients for its meals because they are cheap, and the outcomes are the same.

Unhappy customers who won’t be back
No referrals or recommendations to new customers
Bad online reviews
Bad reputation
Loss of income and profit

So, while it is tempting to buy the cheapest materials you can find to shave a few hundred dollars off your RTO’s operating costs, you really need to consider what your decision is really costing you.

If you care about your students, your integrity, your reputation and your profit margins, you owe it to yourself, your trainers, your RTO, and your paying customers to purchase quality training materials from Australian experts who have not only done the jobs they write about but who also know how to write easy to follow, engaging and compliant resources that will add value to your RTO, both in terms of customer satisfaction and a reduction in overall cost.