Vanessa McCarthy
Vanessa McCarthy
Vanessa McCarthy has over 20 years’ experience in the vocational education and training sector within a wide variety of compliance roles, where she specialises in assessment compliance.
Being committed to compliance innovation and system improvement in VET, Vanessa created Valid8ed™️ and Prickly2sweet™️. These comprise the first online assessment review system that maps and gap analyses assessment resources. The system then provides clear and measurable data on compliance, as well as reports that are easy to read and useful in improvement, down to the keyword.
Vanessa strives to provide information about assessment to inspire and push others to new heights of quality, excellence and compliance. She is passionate about and dedicated to quality in vocational education, especially assessment and validation processes. An innovator, small business and company owner, director and entrepreneur, she currently works in assessment review and RTO compliance.
Find out more at prickly2sweet.com.au
Mastering Vocational Assessments
Mastering Vocational Assessments: A Practical Guide Using 6 Simple Questions answers the fundamental questions of Why, Who, What, When, Where and How to assess. Building on the success of 101 Assessment Tips and the continuous growth of the Prickly2Sweet™ system, author and VET expert Vanessa McCarthy addresses readers' and users’ desire for more in-depth guidance.
Mastering Vocational Assessments answers the key questions and helps develop strategies for sustainable VET assessment in a constantly evolving industry.
101 Assessment Tips: Enhancing Understanding of Vocational Quality
‘101 Tips is a useful supporting tool for a compliance team conducting an internal audit. It is a great resource to help teams review the work according to the Standards for RTOs.
101 Assessment Tips
covers all the relevant requirements in an easy-to-understand layout. It enables the user to find a specific area they may want to refresh their knowledge on.’
Dr Sandra Gallagher, Director Eureka Learning Network Pty Ltd
‘This is a great read and a great resource to help with the understanding of assessment quality. It is in plain English and gets rid of the grey of resource development, making it green and gold. 101 tips, it is more than that, it is full of knowledge from an industry professional that knows their stuff and has broken it down in a way that anyone can understand. They don’t need to be a resources developer or compliance manager to understand it. The short chapters make for easy reading and even the busiest person won’t have excuses to not read it.’
Caitlin Carruthers, Office and Compliance Manager, FS Alliance
‘101 Assessment Tips comes at a crucial time as artificial intelligence dominates discussion about what is real and what is not in assessment. It offers useful insights and practical guidance to those involved in delivery, assessment, quality and compliance in vocational education and training. From the outset Vanessa McCarthy states that 'assessment must require students to demonstrate skills and knowledge across a range of environments and contexts' and that 'all competency assessments are to be based or assessed in real-world situations'. It is this grounding in the real world that will continue to provide the robustness of and confidence in the vocational system that will be critical in producing well-trained, adaptable learners with transferable skills in the future.
This book lays out tips and guidance in a simple, straightforward and easy-to-navigate format allowing you to go directly to the relevant tip. The plain-English questions, the examples, the 'prickly' aspects and the 'sweet' spots are all easy to read, direct and to-the-point, making it a must-have resource for those with experience or who are new to the sector. Beyond this, the book provides clarity to the world of vocational assessment and successfully strikes a balance between compliance and quality and the all-important learner focus. In doing so, it provides interesting insight into assessment in the Australian vocational system and practical guidance to contribute to its ongoing strength.
I enjoyed reading these tips on LinkedIn at the time and have found myself re-engaged by seeing all the threads drawn together in this book. If you are a practitioner, have an interest in training or would like to understand how well thought out assessment will hold up in a technologically fluid world, I would recommend 101 Assessment Tips.’
Alana Harris, PhD
