End of SLDN for hospitality

We would like to announce that SLDN (Dual National System) program will be stopped by 2019, except for retails course. It has been a miserable year (2018) for administrative requirements of this course. While the rest of the world are going digital, certain parties of the ministry are increasing papers for SLDN courses. Not only for the assessments and reports, but also the exhaustive documents needed to qualify for allowance claims. Not to mention the consistent flip-flop changes and amendments of documents year by year.

Renewal of a certificate

In 2011, the renewal form consists of 4 pages only. In 2018, the form has almost 40 pages. The new form consists of all applications for renewal, new registration, personnel registration, besides the confusing many boxes of these and those.. resulted with so much confusion, and so much time spent just to understand the form! The involvement of The Instructional Trainers Center (CIAST) has not helped at all, but made things worst of all time. We have been going in circle to fill up this unfriendly form, and stuck for 8 months in just correcting the missing documents needed. It took almost 1 year to renew our partner’s (participating hotels) course certificate. Imagine that there is no difference between documents required for renewal and registering a new course. They still request ownership title of the land, appointment letters of trainers and coaches and what not! In order to register a new participating industrial partner, we need to inform their personnel to attend an introduction course first. And this course is conducted elsewhere in the country, not in the potential industrial partner’s premise! Have we forgotten who needs who? As a result, we found it very unfriendly to persuade a new center to register. As if, the system doesn’t want the emergence of a new center.

Allowance Claim

Almost one centimeter thick of documents? They have never been able to comply with 2 weeks delivery of allowance as stipulated by the government’s rules. In some cases, the process took 6 months. How do we keep our apprentices motivated when they felt cheated especially when allowances are delayed?

After all claim documents checked by the regional office, then these claim documents are sent to PTPK (claim section), then once again we have to undergo the next series of rejects, usually about documents not tally, errors in certain codes, in-similarity of this and that and these and those… gosh! Not to mention the ‘strange’ feedback of those involved in claims, especially when we try to follow up after a month, the most common response is ‘owh.. i have just received your claim on my table today!’

Course Assessment

We missed the simplicity of assessment back in 2011, when courses concluded with only 1 assessment at the end. In 2018, each modules are required to have the following documents :

1. Continuous Theory Assessment
2. Continuous Practical Assessment
3. Final Theory Assessment
4. Final Practical Assessment
5. Four (4) self assessments by apprentices
6. Four (4) observation assessments by coach
7. JSU (schedule of questions for exam)
8. Logbook – written 5 days a week throughout the course!
9. PPL (Final Assessment – 7 documents per modules!  – 2 sets of theory, 2 sets of theory answers, 1 set of theory question specification, 2 sets of practical questions)

Imagine if we have 3 modules for PPL, there are 21 examination documents, plus the letter of application and examination schedules, makes altogether 24 documents per course!!! Two centimeters thick of papers!

Not to mention that number 1-4 are required for each modules!!!!

Are we going more academic than the universities or have we lost the sense of ‘This is vocational studies!’, where practical plays the most important role?

Our Comment

Imagine if we are carrying out 7 different courses, the number of papers involved, the time spent on redundancy assessment work, the cost we have to bear, the time lost for conducting classes and carrying out observation! In fact, we have lost so much office time in attending these documents, and we lost time to carry out our main company objectives. We had been patient enough to carry on with these programs, in anticipation of helping the nation to increase skilled workers, but now we feel that the system has blocked the country!

If the master planner have lost their sense of directions, then we have lost our patience and interest.