QFD-based curriculum planning for vocational education

Abstract

In the past two decades, Hong Kong's economic activities have markedly shifted from manufacturing to services. The economic shift has led to a radical change of manpower demand, which has brought great challenges to industrial training. Besides many new jobs created by the services industries, the upgrade from production to provision of services of the manufacturing industries requires new industrial training programmes. In regard to the needs of the industrial training industry, the aim of the study was to adopt the basic principles of QFD, a proven methodology for achieving customer satisfaction and a useful product development technique, to develop an industrial training curriculum development model for enhancing the industry-specific knowledge required by the job incumbents of the service-oriented manufacturing industries in Hong Kong. Firmly adhering to the QFD principles, the model was characterized by the performance-focused and job-incumbent-centred approach. Recognizing the importance of dually meeting the job performance requirements and the knowledge needs of the incumbents, the model emphasizes that both the employers' and individuals' voices have to be carefully listened to and provides a mechanism for appropriately incorporating the voices into the development process so as to yield a curriculum that would satisfy the respective needs of the two parties. In addition to assisting managers to define the "Whats" and job incumbents to identify the important "Hows", the industry training practitioners' job is to synthesize the materials into a coherent curriculum for meeting their needs. Through logical task appropriation, the model creates an all-win situation for the parties concerned. Using the clothing industry in Hong Kong as the ground for study, a quasi-experiment and two field applications were conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the model. In addition to the high customer satisfaction levels recorded for the industrial training curriculum developed using the model, a number of positive comments were received from those who had used the model in empirical studies. All of the data obtained from the empirical studies provided practical evidence for illustrating that the model is useful for developing industrial training curricula.