Most people who win an industry award talk about what it means to them. Tom Fraser talked about what it confirmed.
Tom recently took home the Excellence in Online Training Delivery Award at the 2026 VET Conference Awards after being nominated by his own students. I’ve known him for about two years. In that time I’ve worked and consulted with him across various projects, and I’ve watched the feedback from his students arrive consistently, session after session, from face-to-face and virtual classrooms across the country to as far as Papua New Guinea. Seeing his hard work first-hand, the award came as no surprise to me, and for Tom, it was a sign he’s heading in the right direction.
“It’s that confirmation. It’s just let me know that I’m on the right track with what I’m doing. I have an idea that every training session I deliver should be 1% better than the one before. That’s a minimum standard. And the way I look at it is, in five years time, if I start with that 1%, it becomes exponential. It just goes through the roof.”
That’s what I found most interesting about Tom’s award. Not the recognition itself, but the personal dogma that saw him achieve it.
Hesitation Towards Online Training
Let’s be honest about where most learners start. They’ve sat through a previous online course or induction session that felt like a slow drain on a Tuesday. They’ve stared at a grid of rectangles while someone read bullet points at them. They’ve submitted work they half understood and walked away with a qualification or certificate that didn’t quite feel earned. By the time they show up to Tom’s sessions, the word that usually describes their expectations is one: impersonal.
Tom knows this and he starts breaking it down as soon as he begins.
“I use the word team as much as I can when I’m training. I try and develop a philosophy where we’re all in this together.”
That shift, from class to team, from teacher to guide, sounds simple but it requires a trainer who has genuinely thought about what makes people feel safe enough to participate, and then built all of his training around that rather than around solely reading text from pre-built materials.
Tom treats online training as its own environment with its own tools and its own possibilities. Coloured chat, emoji reactions, polling tools: real-time signals that can engage students and tell him how the room is travelling when the room is a screen. And from the start of every session, every student knows exactly how they can engage: unmute and speak up, raise a virtual hand, type in the group chat, or for the quieter and more reflective students, send a private message directly to him.
It gives students more than one way to be involved, which matters, because not every learner feels comfortable participating in the same way.
Reading a Room You Can’t See
For someone that’s grown up in a digital age, the hardest thing about online delivery isn’t the tech. It’s the silence.
In a physical room you can feel the energy shift. You catch the glazed eyes, the slowing pens, the moment a group collectively checks out. Online, those signals are harder to spot, and a trainer who isn’t looking for new ones will miss them entirely.
“The cues to spot are there when you’re asking questions. If it just dies off and people stop answering, then usually it’s time for a break.”
Tom runs sessions in 45-minute blocks with deliberate re-oxygenation breaks built in. Not because it’s some mandated WHS rule, but because he’s watched what happens to a group in the back half of a long stretch without one. When energy drops he’ll put a decision to the group: ‘should we cover this topic now or switch things up and cover this one?’. He’s very open about the fact that you can often guide where that vote lands but the act of being asked is itself re-energising. It’s not about completely going off track. It’s about making people feel like they’re part of something, not just spectators.
The Difference Between Good and Great
When I asked Tom what separates a good trainer from a truly excellent one, he answered quickly, then immediately clarified that the speed wasn’t confidence in his own excellence. It was because it’s something he thinks about constantly.
“Do people come out of the session feeling like they’re ready to go tomorrow? That’s the difference. It’s about giving people the opportunity to make mistakes in a low stakes environment — online, in a class — where we can discuss them, fix them up, with the end goal being that at the end of those days, they feel comfortable going and doing that in the workplace.”
It’s a joint standard for those at Plenty. Training isn’t about ticking a box, it isn’t going through the motions. It’s equipping people with the confidence to walk back into their workplace and actually use what they’ve learned. People who finish a course without understanding how it applies to their real world, that’s not training. That’s a very expensive exercise.
Tom’s approach to making learning stick is equally deliberate. Throughout every session he runs a live Word document in the background, capturing discussions, brainstorm outputs, key reflections as they happen. In a face-to-face room that ends up on a whiteboard, with students scrambling to photograph it before it gets wiped. Online, Tom sends it to everyone at the end of the day. It’s a small thing but it’s the extra detail that means a lot.
The same thinking shapes how he structures the room. Breakout groups for collaboration, smaller rooms for pair work and a one-on-one private space he keeps open throughout the entire day.
“I’ve always got a ‘Tom’s Room’ and at any point in time if someone gives me the word or I get an idea that they want to talk privately, bang, I pull them straight into the breakout room — and that just gives them the opportunity to really open up.”
Some of the most passive learners in a group, he says, are the ones with the most to say but they need the space to say.
The Co-Pilot Mentality
If every session is 1% better than the last and that’s been compounding for years, what does that actually look like in practice? I asked Tom what he’s doing now that he wouldn’t have considered three years ago.
He was candid. Tom sees his own learning style as deeply kinaesthetic, hands-on, action-first. Historically that meant he leant toward demonstration in his own delivery sessions. Show them how it’s done, then hand it over. What he’s learned is that for most learners, that order needs to flip.
“The better plan is usually to let them pilot it and you’re the guide. Rather than me demonstrating — if someone asks me a question, I’m always assessing where their digital skills are and I’m wondering whether it’s possible to get them to share their screen and for me to talk them through it.”
It sometimes takes twice as long. But the confidence a learner builds from doing it themselves is something a demonstration can never replicate. The best training isn’t a trainer performing competence at the front of the room. It’s a learner building it for themselves.
The Most Important Conversation in Training Right Now
The topic of the responsible use of AI is possibly the largest current global discussion. When exploring what that looks like for trainers and assessors, Tom’s thoughts are nuanced. He’s very upfront about the fact that he doesn’t have all the answers, but I think he’s asking the right questions, and in an industry that moves fast, critical thinking and review is more important than ever.
The pandemic forced an adoption of online learning that might have taken another decade to happen organically. More accessible, more flexible, more available, a silver-lining to a tumultuous three years. But Tom is watching something develop alongside it that concerns him.
“I feel like as a species, humans have been going up for 60,000 years and we have finally hit a plateau and we are going to come down in our intelligence over the next 10 to 15 years. Digital literacy in young people, for example, is going down and is 40% worse than it was three years ago.”
It’s a confronting thing to hear from someone who has dedicated his career to education. But the answer he arrives at isn’t to a complete objection to the technology, but rather to be selective.
“If you’re comfortable to share that you’re using AI with your boss or with an assessor, and you’re happy to tell them how you used it, then more likely than not you’ve used it responsibly. If you’re not happy to tell them — then you probably haven’t used it responsibly.”
The distinction Tom draws is between AI as a learning tool and AI as an operational tool, and your own competence is the deciding factor on how you should be using it. If you don’t yet fully understand the content, use AI to help you learn it. Once you do, use it to work more efficiently. But that foundation has to come first, because without it, you won’t know when AI is wrong. And it will be wrong.
He’s not dismissing it. He sees it as one of his biggest professional development priorities right now. A student with ADHD navigating a heavy course load can find simplicity and structure in its application. An student who is more comfortable with learning through audio can now turn their materials into a podcast through NotebookLM and listen while doing the dishes. The tools, used well, are extraordinary. The responsibility is entirely in how we use them.
Climbing the Mountain Together
Toward the end of our conversation I mentioned a quote that had been sitting with me. A well known sports coach recently opened his tenure with his new team with a concise philosophy: compete, together, get better. I told Tom it reminded me of him, the 1% improvement, the team language, the idea that nobody gets through it alone.
He immediately pulled up a clip that I could have sworn he had bookmarked.
It was a Tour de France rider being interviewed after winning a stage, a rider who openly admits he’s not the strongest in the race. He talked about the pain of the day, the doubt, watching teammates suffer beside him and finding something to hold onto anyway.
“I’ve always had that philosophy. We’re all climbing the mountains together, and we’re all tired, but you look around and you look at all the other faces and everyone’s having the same trouble. So you’ve just got to keep holding strong. You know the team is going to get through. And then at the end of the day you get this immense satisfaction out of what you’ve done as a team.”
That’s what Tom is building in every session. Not a class. A team. And when the team gets through it, everyone feels the win.
The Feedback That Stays
I finished by asking Tom about the piece of feedback that has stayed with him most. He didn’t hesitate.
It came from Papua New Guinea. A group of nationals he travelled to train and assess on-site, with blended online components woven through. His goal wasn’t just to get them qualified. It was to equip them to go on and train others. To build something self-sustaining that didn’t require external trainers every time.
What he found when he got there was something he didn’t quite expect. A group of people who understood exactly what they were being given and held onto it with both hands. No reluctance. No waiting for the day to be over. Just genuine, undisguised hunger for the opportunity.
“To be a part of them getting their own national people who can do it in Pidgin English and in Papua New Guinean is so much more valuable to me than me going there and doing it… being a part of a bigger picture, not just the short term.”
We often take for granted the skills we’re handed. These students didn’t. And Tom carried that back with him.
Only last week, as news of his award went out in our newsletter, I received a reply from one of the training organisers at the Porgera mine. He wrote:
“I want to express our sincere gratitude for your support in arranging for Tom Fraser to travel to Papua New Guinea to deliver the TAE40122 training. This is a moment of great pride for our team and the students from New Porgera Limited, especially given Tom Fraser’s recent Excellence in Online Training Delivery Award. We deeply admire the wealth of experience and talent your trainers bring to the table. On behalf of 13 students from Papua New Guinea, we are thrilled to celebrate this well deserved recognition. Please extend our heartfelt congratulations to Tom Fraser.”
That email is the 1% made visible. It’s what happens when a trainer stops asking how do I get through this session and starts asking how do I change what comes after it.
By Levi Luke
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