Your RTO will not arrange your placement — now what?

Discovering halfway through a course that placement is your problem is one of the more common ways students get stuck. It is recoverable, but the order you do things in matters.

There is no universal rule that a registered training organisation must find your host workplace. Some arrange every placement. Some arrange none and say so at enrolment. Some sit in between, offering a list of contacts and leaving the approach to you.

What is not optional is clarity. Under the 2025 Standards for RTOs, providers are expected to give students clear, accurate and current information about training product requirements — and mandatory placement is a training product requirement. If you were not told, that is worth raising.

Step one: get the position in writing

Before anything else, email your provider and ask four questions. Keep the reply.

1. Does the RTO arrange placement for students in this qualification, or is the student responsible?
2. How many hours does my training plan require, and which units will be assessed on placement?
3. What does the RTO provide to a host workplace — agreement template, insurance confirmation, supervisor guidance?
4. What support is available if I cannot secure a host within a reasonable period?

You need the answers regardless, because every host will ask you the same things. Getting them in writing also creates a record if you later need to escalate.

What your RTO should provide even if it does not source

Even where sourcing is left to you, a host workplace will not proceed without documents that only your provider can issue:

• A placement agreement setting out the responsibilities of the student, the host and the RTO
• Confirmation of insurance covering the student while on placement
• The training plan or logbook showing what is to be assessed and how hours are recorded
• A supervisor guide explaining what the workplace supervisor is expected to sign off

If a provider cannot supply an agreement and insurance confirmation, you will struggle to place yourself anywhere reputable. No competent facility takes a student without them.

Step two: approach hosts properly

Most student enquiries fail because they arrive as a general request. The ones that work are specific and make it easy to say yes.

• State your qualification code and the exact hours required
• State the days and times you can attend, as dates rather than "flexible"
• Confirm you already hold the required checks
• Attach or offer the RTO's agreement and insurance confirmation
• Address it to a named person where you can find one

Approach the operations or facility manager rather than a general inbox where possible, and follow up once after a week. Two follow-ups is persistence; four is a reason to be filtered.

Step three: widen the search sensibly

If local options are exhausted, widen in this order: nearby suburbs, then adjacent sectors your qualification permits, then a different placement pattern. For individual support, for instance, the qualification allows aged care, home and community care, disability and community services settings — students often only ask residential aged care homes.

If it is genuinely not working

Escalate inside your RTO first, in writing, to the compliance or student support contact rather than your trainer. Set out what you have done, who you approached and what response you received. A documented, reasonable attempt changes the conversation.

If that goes nowhere, RTOs are required to have a complaints and appeals process, and you are entitled to use it. Beyond that, the national regulator publishes information for students about raising concerns with a provider.

Reading your enrolment paperwork properly

Before escalating anything, go back to what you signed. Student agreements, course information statements and pre-enrolment material usually address placement somewhere, even if briefly. What you are looking for is any statement about who arranges it.

Three outcomes are possible, and they lead in different directions. If the paperwork says the RTO arranges placement, you have a straightforward case to make. If it says you are responsible, you know where you stand and can get on with it. If it is silent, that silence is itself worth raising, because providers are expected to give clear and current information about training product requirements.

Writing an approach that gets answered

Most student enquiries to host facilities read the same: a paragraph explaining that the student is studying and needs placement, ending with a request to be considered. From the facility's side, these are indistinguishable from each other and easy to leave unanswered.

A version that works is shorter and more specific. State the qualification and code. State the exact number of hours. State the days you can attend, as actual days. Confirm you hold the required checks. Say that your RTO will provide an agreement and insurance confirmation. Ask one clear question: whether they have supervision capacity in the next two months.

A facility manager can answer a specific question in thirty seconds. A general request needs a decision, and decisions get deferred.

Keeping a record while you search

Track every approach — who, when, by what channel, and what came back. This is tedious and it matters for three reasons: it stops you contacting the same service twice, it shows your RTO you have made a genuine effort if you need support, and it tells you when a polite no was actually a not-right-now worth revisiting.

When the problem is the qualification, not you

Some placements are genuinely harder to source than others. Specialised settings, qualifications with unusual unit combinations, and areas with few relevant providers all produce longer searches. If you have made twenty well-targeted approaches without success, the issue may be structural rather than anything you are doing wrong.

At that point, widening the setting, widening the geography, or getting help from someone with existing host relationships is a more productive use of your time than a twenty-first email.

Or get help with the sourcing

This is the gap we exist to fill. You can be enrolled with any registered training organisation and still ask us to source and manage the placement — we just need the placement requirements your RTO has set, so the host we match you to meets them.

What that changes in practice is who does the chasing. Instead of sending cold emails to facilities who have never heard of you, your request goes to hosts who have already told us they have supervision capacity.