Project summary

Objective

• Increase awareness and capacity of course authors, presenters, and providers to design and host ‘barrier-free professional learning events that enable employees (with or without disability) to participate on the same basis.

Benefits

Learning and development courses that are available and fit for purpose for all employees:

• Improves the employee experience for staff with a disability in particular for career path progression.
• Increases compliance with our legislative obligations to provide equal access to information and services under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Disability Discrimination Act(DDA), and Australian Standard EN 301 549:2020.
• Decreases organisational risk

What will success look like?

• Learning and development courses for all staff department-wide to be compliant with international accessibility standards WCAG 2.1 AA it's successor standards.

How will success be measured?

• Quality assurance process to be applied to professional learning.
  • Note: High-level discussions are currently underway to establish a group for a quality assurance process to be identified and undertaken for all professional learning for both corporate and schools. This will be initially managed through a Professional Learning Taskforce.
• Short term action measures include:
  • Click rates on webpage content relating to inclusive design
  • Enquiries from business units on how they can engage and support learners

Key project milestones

Short term for completion by September 2021

• Add the creating inclusive professional learning html on Diversity and Inclusion webpage
  • Note: This action requires the support of the Organisational Culture and Capability, Culture and Diversity team to review and update content as required.
• June 2021 – communication strategy to promote inclusive design principles, for example staff noticeboard, Yammer groups, newsletters, digital boards at 105P, staff portal pop-ups, Learning and development community within the department
• July 2021 - Promote awareness of the PSC disability awareness eLearning via the Corporate Learning Centre news banner and staff noticeboard with a recurring schedule every 6 months
• July 2021 – include link to webpage for creating inclusive professional learning (guidance for learning authors to make sure any new training is accessible) on corporate learning (learning and development) intranet pages
• August 2021 – Speak with D and I team regarding reasonable adjustment requirements for staff progressing their careers.

Long term

• Investigate the feasibility of the acquisition of a course authoring tool that complies with WCAG 2.1 or above which can be discussed in collaboration with business units such as; CESE (Education and Skills Reform) , ITD (Operations), PLNTS and MyPL (Operations)