Trainer-currency evidence planner
Estimate the time and cost of keeping vocational currency and professional development evidence current across your trainers.
For RTO compliance managers, trainers maintaining their own files
How to use this calculator
Start with the worked example below. Replace the figures in Your numbers with your own inputs, then select Recalculate. Read the assumptions and limitations before using the estimate in your planning. Save report downloads the last calculated results and inputs.
Hours per year across all trainers
353.33 hours
Currency activity, evidence recording and file review, for everyone.
- Hours per trainer per year
- 44.17 hours
- What one trainer's currency costs in time, including the paperwork.
- Currency activity per trainer
- 40 hours
- Industry currency plus professional development.
- Evidence recording per trainer
- 2.67 hours
- The administrative half, often left out of workload planning entirely.
- File review per trainer
- 1.5 hours
- Compliance checking time, which falls on the RTO rather than the trainer.
- Cost per year
- $22,966.67
- Total hours at the hourly cost entered. Excludes course fees and travel.
This is an estimate to support your professional judgement, not a determination. Our tools draft. You validate.
Saves the last calculated inputs, results and assumptions to your device. Recalculate after changing inputs.
Your numbers
People whose currency you maintain evidence for.
Time in the industry the trainer teaches: placements, projects, paid work, structured site visits.
VET practice development: assessment, LLN, delivery methods, regulatory updates.
Writing it up, attaching proof and filing it so it can be produced later.
Distinct things needing their own evidence record, rather than total hours.
A compliance check that the file is complete and current.
How often each file is checked. Annually is common; twice a year is safer before a known audit.
Total cost per hour including on-costs, for both trainer and reviewer time.
How this is worked out
Currency hours per trainer = industry hours + PD hours. Evidence-recording hours = activities × minutes ÷ 60. Review hours = reviews per year × minutes ÷ 60. Per trainer total = currency + recording + review. Organisation total = per trainer × trainers.
What it assumes
- Industry and professional development hours are additional to delivery time, not carved out of it.
- Each activity is recorded once, close to when it happened. Reconstructing a year of evidence at audit time takes considerably longer.
- The same hourly cost applies to trainer time and reviewer time.
What it does NOT account for
- Course fees, conference registration, travel and accommodation for the activities themselves.
- Backfill: the cost of covering delivery while a trainer is on industry placement.
- Initial credentialing: the TAE qualification and vocational competencies a trainer needs before they start.
- Whether the evidence is sufficient. This estimates effort; sufficiency is a judgement about relevance and recency.
What to do next
- List which trainers are closest to a currency gap and sequence the year around them, rather than spreading effort evenly.
- Check that industry currency is in the industry each trainer actually teaches. Hours in an adjacent field are the most common gap found at audit.
- Put the recording time in the trainer's workload, not on top of it. Unrecorded activity is the same as no activity when a file is reviewed.
- Keep the evidence at the person level with an access rule; it is personal information about a named individual.
Sources
- Standards for RTOs 2025: VET workforce currency: Outcome Standards, Division 2: trainers hold competencies, current industry skills and current VET knowledge and practice (reviewed 2026-08-27)
- Hours per year: Entered as inputs. The Standards require currency, not a prescribed number of hours; the defensible position is documented relevance and recency. (reviewed 2026-08-27)