This paper reports on and analyses a research team’s experiences in utilising multiple iterative methods in a national project. The project, Recognising the skill in jobs traditionally considered unskilled, was funded by the Australian Research Council and the research took place over the period mid-2011-early 2015. As it was a Linkage Project, there were Industry Partner Organisations, two Industry Skills Councils and the trade union United Voice. The researchers came from the education, industrial relations and human resource management disciplines. They had not worked together as a team previously but had all undertaken related research within their own disciplines. The question of skill recognition is a highly contested one with commentators divided into opposing camps with firmly-held views.
The project focused on nine low-status occupations in three major industry areas (service industries, manufacturing and property services) and consisted of serial qualitative research components beginning with major stakeholders and policy-makers in industrial relations and vocational education and training at the national level. Within each occupation, a cascading methodology was then utilised, based on successive conduct and analysis of rounds of interviews with people from policy experts to managers and workers on the ground. A combination of semi-structured and structured interviews was utilised, the latter including the deployment of refined versions of interviewing tools which had been developed in antecedent projects. One feature of the research was an extensive use of validation techniques, using feedback from consultative forums assembled with the assistance of the Industry Partner Organisations. The project culminated in a national meeting of major stakeholders followed by a validation of the findings by international academic experts. An unexpected and complicating but informative factor was considerable structural and policy turbulence in the Industry Skills Council sector at the time, which in fact led to the abandonment of one planned stage of the project.

This paper focuses on the benefits of the multiple methods utilised and how they added depth and nuance to the project findings. It also addresses the challenges arising in a method of such complexity and the inherent challenges in the iterative validation process. In addition, the paper discusses the challenges of working with Industry Partner Organisations in an environment of political uncertainty.