Expert support on VET issues for the European Commission

The Council Recommendation on voca­tio­nal education and training for sus­tainable com­pe­ti­ti­ve­ness, social fairness and resi­li­ence adopted in November 2020 defines key prin­ci­ples for ensuring that voca­tio­nal education and training is agile, adapts swiftly to labour market needs and provides quality learning oppor­tu­ni­ties for all age groups.

The current contract, coor­di­na­ted by ICF (BE), provides for a range of support services with the following objectives:

• to provide support for the imple­men­ta­ti­on of the European policy on quality assurance in VET (EQAVET– European Quality Assurance Reference Framework for Vocational Education and Training, as inte­gra­ted in the VET Recommendation; Council Recommendation on micro-cre­den­ti­als);
• to provide support for the imple­men­ta­ti­on of the EQAVET indi­ca­tors specific to graduate tracking and for the imple­men­ta­ti­on of the Council Recommendation on graduate tracking in VET;
• to continue further exploring the concept of the European voca­tio­nal core profiles for shortage occu­pa­ti­ons and reco­gni­ti­on of skills, qua­li­fi­ca­ti­ons and cre­den­ti­als, including micro-cre­den­ti­als, in relation to such profiles for both EEU/EEA indi­vi­du­als and third country nationals.

A large part of the work is related to the support acti­vi­ties that the EQAVET Secretariat provides for the EQAVET Network. Karin Luomi-Messerer and Monika Auzinger support the Secretariat as experts and are respon­si­ble, among other things, for the pre­pa­ra­ti­on, imple­men­ta­ti­on and docu­men­ta­ti­on of the second round of system level peer reviews in some member countries.

Another large part of the work is dedicated to online peer learning acti­vi­ties, with 3s experts as activity managers for designing and orga­ni­s­ing the following events:

• two peer learning acti­vi­ties regarding quality assurance/standards for micro-cre­den­ti­als (Karin Luomi-Messerer);
• two peer learning acti­vi­ties regarding EU voca­tio­nal core profiles (Monika Auzinger);
• three peer learning events on graduate tracking (Stefan Humpl).