There are few celebrants in Australia who would argue that they know everything about celebrancy.
Some of our colleagues come pretty close, through long involvement in celebrancy and/or personal training circumstances. Fortunately they are in our midst, and prepared to share their profound understanding of civil celebrancy.
For the rest of us, however, we plod along as best we can, but once each year, we are expected to update our professional knowledge in varying hours of ongoing professional learning, a fairly recent innovation of Marriage Celebrant Section. Obviously the intent is for us to grow as celebrants, and where possible, to address our individual perceived gaps in understanding, with a view to providing a better service, eventually, to the marrying public of Australia.
I have no problems with this. Professionally I believe in an ongoing cycle of renewal and growth, without which our celebrancy would become static, and possibly redundant.
I also believe strongly that the individual approach is essential – how many professions have adopted a ‘one size fits all’ approach, with great dissatisfaction from participants? So, in general, while I think the whole concept of ongoing professional – but individual – focus and enhancement, at least once a year, is a valid concept, there are issues with the operational aspects of this concept.
The future of OPD is not yet shared fully, at time of writing. Fortunately that leaves me an ideal opportunity to reflect at my ideal vision of OPD.
The world of adult learning is very different to that of schools and student learning, if only because as adults, we are so very different in background, life skills, learning styles, knowledge, technological knowledge, ages and stages of life (who would know that Gen X and Y are so different in approach to we poor baby-boomers?). And we are such an opinionated lot!
Give me three celebrants, and it is to be expected that there will be three vehemently argued points of view!! (all of them right of course…). Therein lies one of the major issues to do with this future – the second a vision is articulated, there will be five celebrants in dispute that this is a valid approach. Unless we can somehow come to some sort of a unified view about what we want for our ongoing professional growth and development, then alas, it WILL be decided for us. Our Coalition of Civil Associations (CoCA), preferably in consultation with Marriage Celebrant Section, has a huge job ahead of it, purely and simply to reach that stage of consensus about the vision of professional development.
But what do we want?
Well, we are creatures of habit, and fairly uncomfortable outside of our comfort zones. We depend on our previous knowledge and skill levels to guide us in the important decisions of today. For some people, however, analysing what critical areas of their persona needs improving is a difficult exercise. How do you know what you don’t know, if you don’t know it? (if you understand my drift).
Perhaps some sort of a skills audit might be a useful exercise to engage in every three or four years – perhaps an online tool where the full range of celebrant skills is articulated across legal, ceremony development, interpersonal skills, small business, technology, performance skills and other domains. We have the work of the celebrant associations with the Skills Council to improve the initial training requirements for new celebrants, and this could be of benefit to inform the base skills identified.
OK, so if you now know what areas to improve, how could you go about it?
There are many quality training providers, many with qualified, skilled, talented, committed and personable facilitators who have previously been hamstrung by limited content. There are also many associations who have similarly qualified presenters and facilitators, and who lobby hard for their members, to make sure that they offer value for membership dollar. Then there are the TAFE colleges around the country, who are in a position to offer a range of core units, albeit often without qualified celebrants. Therein lies another issue.
How to get the best of both worlds, for that is surely what we deserve?
There are insufficient numbers of us to dedicate an entire training program purely and simply to 5 hours of OPD for each of us and/or the initial training needs of new celebrants (whatever that number looks like in years to come – another issue that I won’t discuss at this time). So my ideal vision is that all of these groups also find a way to communicate and talk, and perhaps our training providers, celebrants extraordinaire, can perhaps provide training through the national networks of TAFEs around the country. I would query whether the limited Registered Training Organisations, with the capacity to offer celebrant training, are in a position to train the whole country. Not only is it an arduous task, but an immense one with some 8000 civil celebrants alone.
There are issues in the content that is on offer to celebrants. By and large, we have not taken advantages of opportunities to streamline our focus, to apply and get approval for the web design courses, or the small business units, or the performance skills necessary as part of our celebrant work. This year has been particularly difficult in that elective unit content was restricted to that previously on offer, along with the DVD of core information for mandatory purchase by celebrants.
That might also address one of the OPD issues of compliance and accountability. There are a small number of celebrants who feel that based on their experience and longevity as a celebrant that there is nothing on offer that they need. I am going to be contentious here and suggest that there is no place in celebrancy for that blatant arrogance. Appreciating the evolution of the OPD programme, what was perhaps suitable in previous years, with the very best of intentions by those early OPD providers, is in so many instances not suitable now. There is a place for basic concepts, for there will always be new celebrants who need the refresher units, and the basic information to set them off on their celebrancy journey. There is also a place for far more individual and meaningful content in celebrancy OPD on offer – and the evolution of that has started. There are many people around the country working to make OPD for celebrants individual, targeted, open-ended and meaningful to a range of celebrants.
Have we achieved that right now? No, we haven’t, but there are some very good people working very hard on the problem.
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