Principal consultant
Dr.Richard Curtain

Curtain Consulting, Melbourne

Dr Richard Curtain -  Established Curtain Consulting in 1993.

Prior appointments include:

• Associate Professor, National Key Centre in Industrial Relations, Graduate School of Management, Monash University,

• Principal Project Officer, Bureau of Labour Market Research, and

• Postdoctoral Fellow, The Australian National University, Institute of Advanced Studies. 

He has also worked as an internal consultant in workplace reform in the Public Transport Corporation of Victoria (1992-3).

Richard has a doctorate from The Australian National University (1981) in Geography, a Master of Arts  in sociology from Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey and an honours degree in sociology from La Trobe University, Melbourne.

Areas of specialisation include:

• research-based public policy analysis with a strong emphasis on identifying international best practice

• Extensive experience in consulting on the learning strategies of enterprises, and more effective ways to organise work

• contract-based research project on national and international issues related to skill formation, and the use of information and communication technologies in learning, employment creation and development projects

Richard has published widely on the theoretical and practical aspects of the school-to-work transition, the workplace of the future, skill formation in Australia, Japan, USA and UK and issues related to public policy development, implementation and program evaluation.

Current honorary appointments include

• Professional Associate of the National Institute for Governance, University of Canberra,

• Research Associate, National Institute of Labour Studies at Flinders University,

• Member, Education and Training Statistics Advisory Group of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000-2003 and

• Participant, 'Experts Panel', Victorian Qualifications Authority, 2001-2002. 

Richard has a mentoring relationship with The Centre of Applied Social Research and Policy Studies at the Dili Institute of Technology, Timor Leste.

With Professor Meredith Edwards, he has initiated the Australian Public Policy Research Network - www.apprn.org