As we move into the award season, with the Australian hair industry awards, and the Australian Fashion Awards, it’s an important time to reflect, particularly on what excellence in education really looks like and how it can serve industry better. Excellence in education and service to our industry is importantly recognized alongside business and creative award categories and some of the greatest names in hairdressing education have taken out these awards over the years. The honour roll reads like a who’s who, Sharon Blain Education, Dario Cotroneo Education, BIBA Academy and Sevilles are just a few of the names that have taken out these awards over time.
So I suppose for me as a training business, we reflect on what these education businesses have in common and what are the benchmarks that we need to exceed and reach to be the very best in hairdressing education. For me, in such a creative and focused progressive industry, moving forward and staying current is the critical thing. We see the best of breed educators are those who are able to reflect on what they are currently doing, outline a range of activities that they’re undertaking that challenges the norms and keeps pace with industry. There’s some real key touch points to cover if you’re going to be the best of breed in education. You need a progressive calendar. You need to have marketing and branding that attracts the next generation. You need to have a philosophy and teaching concept that second to none. You need to work on feedback and industry engagement from all parties and you need to develop really strong plans for your trainers to keep them up to date and current. And I suppose supporting young learners beyond just the formal training, so that they can grow as people as well to grow into our industry. I think finally contributing to industry growth and sustainability is important. Everything that you do as an educator needs to be looked at through the lens of what is best for industry.
Importantly, there are some frameworks out there that that we really admire and love to be part of. We are a member of the Australian Hairdressing Council, and the Australian Hairdressing Council recognizes excellence in education through its RTO Select platform. RTO Select is amazing because it looks education leaders, it looks at industry engagement and communication. It looks at training and assessment resources, and it also looks at currency of educators, as well as college salon design including those things that are so critical, which are environmental and social responsibilities. Having benchmarks like that helps us to achieve great things in training. And it helps us to keep ourselves connected with everything that’s happening in salons daily and with the barbershops that we look after. We’ll be entering the awards this year like many others, as always trying to benchmark ourselves and do the very best we can.
If you’d like to talk about ways that we can potentially work together or advice on training arrangements. We’d love to connect. MIG training is committed to working as best we can to provide excellence in education.