A key objective of the Learning for Living professional development initiative was to establish communities of learning. Initially these were geographically arranged communities involving clusters of organisations. This evolved into a professional development cluster conducted wholly within one organisation. A feature of this change was greater involvement of vocational tutors, and the promotion of team teaching involving specialist literacy tutors and vocational tutors.
The professional development initiative at Unitec was one of two “onsite clusters” started in 2006 where the cluster community is drawn from different parts of the organisation. The other cluster was at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT).