What units of competency are
A unit of competency is the smallest nationally recognised building block of an Australian vocational education and training qualification. Each unit defines a discrete set of skills and knowledge a learner must demonstrate, along with the standard to which they must demonstrate it. Units come from nationally endorsed training packages, which means the same unit means the same thing across every registered training organisation that delivers it.
Qualifications are assembled from units. A given qualification specifies a set of core units that everyone must complete and a range of electives from which a learner chooses, and completing the required combination is what earns the qualification. For an RTO, the unit is the level at which most of the important data lives: enrolment, delivery, assessment outcome and completion are all tracked unit by unit. That granularity is also what national reporting is built on, because training activity is reported at the level of units of enrolment.
Units of competency in the Cohiva platform
Cohiva Campus is a student management system and LMS for Australian registered training organisations, built around a data-driven AVETMISS and NAT file compliance engine. Because the student data model tracks enrolment and outcomes at the unit level, the same records that run delivery and assessment also feed the figures an RTO reports to NCVER.
For a compliance manager, that means the reporting is derived from the operational data rather than re-entered. Campus supports CRICOS and government-funded RTOs. To see how it works, explore Campus.