The now enacted amalgamation of GOTAFE and Wodonga TAFE is expected to build a bigger and better education institution to service the thousands of students seeking tertiary qualifications every year in the region and beyond.

The two bodies formed at the start of the year under the legal name Northern Victoria Institute of TAFE and both TAFEs will maintain their individual branding.

Prior to the combine, both TAFEs serviced 17,000 students per annum and offered about 360 courses.

It's a combination that's expected to bring great benefits to the organisation, with CEO Phil Paterson confident the larger scale will create efficiencies and wider reach in student services.

A strategy will be rolled out this year and Mr Peterson said they will draw on the talent of the 1000-strong workforce to help will the migration of the two entities into one.

He said the amalgamation will give the organisation greater reach into Wodonga, Wangaratta, Shepparton and Seymour to really cover the broader northern corridor, from close proximity out of Melbourne, right up to the border.

"The amalgamation of the two entities is voluntary and it will bring huge benefits to our region," Mr Paterson said.

"It's going to be a much bigger scale of entity with anything upwards of 1000 staff.

"The amalgamation was enacted on 1 January 2026 and we're now in the process of bringing our two organisations together under one single legal entity."

The provision of courses that make people job ready into secure employment at the completion or to transition into higher level qualification is the driving goal.

"We've already started the process at looking at capitalising on the process of course offerings between the GOTAFE brand and Wodonga TAFE brand so we're starting to look at how we expand our course offerings and our course delivery across the region," Mr Paterson said.

"We may have individually had gaps in our pathway offerings from Cert 2, 3, 4 and onto diploma and we can now, between us, plug some of those gaps with our own internal offerings.

"It's also true that we can intersect better now with higher education because we now have a broader remit of portfolio that we can actually pathway students through from TAFE into higher education and visa versa.

"We also have some students who come back to TAFE (from higher education) in order to fill out their capability and experiential learning that TAFEs offer."

TAFEs might have in the past had courses that weren't aligned the best they could be with the industry demand but this has changed exponentially over recent years.

"We're looking at courses all the time in terms of what benefits students the most but also what are the things that help with the economic development and support of our local industry.

"For instance the logic innovation precinct is another component of our innovation where we're looking to get out from behind the concept of training packages and really work closely with industry in a vocational applied research capability to actually build that capability and become a real strength in regional Victoria and even indeed nationally as well.

"The logic precinct is focused on a whole range of advanced capabilities, but focused initially on heavy vehicle technologies and heavy vehicle transport technologies.

"It's also about how we can roll that into manufacturing, megatronics, and robotics.

"Industry would like to find ways of investing in that but having an education partner there to help assist them is something that we think is going to be quite valuable in the future."

Northern Victoria Institute of TAFE is part of the contract delivery for Australian Defence Force courses, as are many TAFEs across the country.

"One example is we have Charles Darwin University working for us in Darwin, contributing to trades training in Darwin," Mr Paterson noted.

"We have very similar things happening with TAFE NSW or TAFE Queensland supporting us and it's about how we break down some of the state borders and truly operate as a national capability.

"The amalgamation was a smart move and hopefully will have more capability and there could also be efficiencies in systems and processes by only investing in those once rather than two of us investing in them twice over.

"I think it gives us more influence around how we make those decisions with vendors as well, and size and scale do matter when it comes to how you secure the best for ourselves.

"The more efficient we can be the more services we can provide into our local community."

With greater efficiencies Mr Paterson confirmed that the plan is for the education provider to retain staff.

"Voluntary redundancies are not something we're looking at because we have two really talented organisations and our focus is really at the moment making sure we keep that talent in our organisation because we have a huge change ahead of us," he said.

"All those systems and processes are going to require a huge amount of capability within both our teams and we're trying not to do this by using a heavy load of consultants.

"We're trying to do a heavy change process driven by us and resourced by us, therefore we need every hand we can keep to make sure we can keep everything going while we implement the changes.

"I can't reiterate more strongly how this amalgamation is such a really good thing for Victoria and our industries, students and communities."