This week I was asked why anyone would use xAPI.

I know I am not alone in that I take great care when I hire staff; I conduct multiple interviews, set practical tasks and sometimes undertake personality profiling. I will bring my best ‘people people’ to observe each candidate closely.

I am often asked whether our organisation has xAPI capability as part of a requirement for us to be engaged and when I confirm that it does, I'm then asked "so what is xAPI?"

I was recently reviewing a tender for an LMS. In it, was a question that does not have an answer. Pity the poor vendors attempting to respond!

I have been thinking about the term “70:20:10”.

Ultimately all education and training is about knowledge transfer. Part of this is the movement of information from one party to another but knowledge is far more than information.

It is more than five years since harmonised health and safety legislation was introduced across Australia with the exception of Victoria and West Australia. In other jurisdictions a variant of Safe Work Australia's model legislation came into effect on the first of January 2012. It has subsequently been updated with the most recent version released in late 2016. It is supported by Model Regulations.

It is not always practical to recruit for skill as we know but I'd argue it's not always desirable either. All organisations are attracted to the idea of recruiting those with the right certifications and skills, but with ever more understanding of more subtle traits that are at least as important (such as management potential, emotional intelligence and cultural fit) pre-existing skills are increasingly seen as something "in the mix". In fact, many of the more sophisticated traits we now demand are more in-grained and harder to teach. Arguably we should view vocational skills as the easier ones to flag for future development in the right candidate and to an extent, prioritise character traits that are essential.

A look at some of the training sector's darkest secrets...

"Disgraced former Education Department official facing criminal charges for corruption". He stole millions of dollars from the state's schools and spent them on restaurants, wine, parties.