The use of nominal group technique to determine additional support needs of Victorian TAFE senior educators and managers.

Abstract

The Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a structured process to gather information from a group. The technique was first described in 1975 and has since become a widely-used standard to facilitate working groups. The NGT is effective for generating large numbers of creative new ideas and for group priority setting. This paper describes the process of conducting three workshops with senior educators and managers in a metropolitan TAFE Institute in Australia using NGT. The principal purpose of the workshops was to ascertain what additional support the participants required in a period of intense change and to prioritise them in terms of importance to the participants. The secondary purpose of the workshops was to introduce NGT to an organisation that had hitherto not used NGT in formal evaluation of programs or performance.