System is an absolute joke - went through it from 2010-2014 doing an apprenticeship plus another couple of certificates concurrently at night school to skill up.
Spent multiples of 5 figures on the extra certs and got a couple of fancy pieces of paper for my efforts that have been useless in the real world because its one thing to have the papers its another to have the experience and you need the last one before you get the first one to move into the game.
It sort of just taught crap you could learn from the web and Youtube, I can write a mean large report, not sure if it was worth the circa $20K it cost
The automotive side was a lot of book work on **** that stopped appearing on cars before I was born, the most modern engines we had in the place was a Buick V6 and a Holden 304 both from a VN Commodore and an RB30 from a VL.
Holden donated us a new VE Commodore at one point but we didn't have any course work for it so it just sat about collecting dust with a Bosch scan tool mounted in it.
From my experience I'm anti TAFE these days - WOFTAM unless its someone elses money then I'll happily sit in class getting paid to do their inane bull**** by some rabid lefty feminist who hates men and wants to teach us about Marxism instead of Human Resources course that I paid for.
I've done it all wrong, I should have just put 'social commentator' on my CV and started giving lectures at Melbourne University for ****en eleventy bazillion dollars to Chinese students for PR scams.