Vocational Education

There are several vocational courses to be attended in Australia: basically, you can study everything! Whether you have experience or not, with these courses you will be able to improve all your skills in any professional field. The courses are focused on both theory and practice, providing you with all the tools you need to enter the job market.

There are several certificates, each one being the upper step of the previous one:

• Certificate II
• Certificate III
• Certificate IV
• Diploma
• Advanced Diploma

Not all the courses have all the steps, and not all the steps need you to have attended the previous one as a pre-requirement: this really depends on the type of course and the school. All these courses can be packaged with one another, in order to undertake a complete process of improvement, and also with an English course, and a linguistic pre-requirement.

The intake dates for vocational courses are several throughout the year, and they can last from 6 months (3 months seldom) up to 2 years and a half.  The course is usually divided into some terms (or semesters), each of them having 2/3 weeks holiday.

Apart from a high number of private colleges, technical and further education or TAFE (pronounced /ˈteɪf/) institutions provide a wide range of vocational courses, mostly qualifying courses under the National Training System/Australian Qualifications Framework/Australian Quality Training Framework. Fields covered include business, finance, hospitality, tourism, construction, engineering, visual arts, information technology and community work, but the number of courses available is limitless! Individual TAFE institutions (usually with many campuses) are known as either colleges or institutes, depending on the state or territory. TAFE colleges are owned, operated and financed by the various state and territory governments.