ECVET - Application to mobility projects

Main objectives
Workers mobility takes place in a progressive adaptation context, and not in a complete valorization of an achieved qualification.
Students mobility is an important opportunity for young people but, while student transfer between Universities is a praxis, in VET it regards only small internship periods.

There are many obstacles to the information exchange, which are not only linked to the logistics organization; difficulties arise in particular from the heterogeneity of qualifications structure, and from the lack for well established definitions to support transparency.
In order to overcome the obstacles presented above, the Bruges-Copenhagen Process resulted in the development of several key instruments: the EQF (European Qualification Framework), the Europass for certification, the ECVET (European Credit System for VET) for credits recognition, and the EQARF (European Quality Assurance Reference Framework for VET) for quality assurance.

A practical example is represented by a student/worker that, after having achieved a set of competences in his or her own country by attending a specific course, or through prior work in a specific context, decides to move to another country e.g. to look for an employment or to continue his or her training path. The student/worker should need to have a clear idea of classes he or she would need to attend and of the competences he or she will need to achieve in the foreign country in order to get employed.

With respect to the above picture, it could be useful to consider not only the general context - for which identifying a comprehensive solution is, at the present time, quite a complex task - but also specific scenarios representing concrete examples of transnational mobility (e.g. two countries, two formative paths) as they could be useful to underline the constraints represented by competence gaps. Recognition, in this latter case, could represent an insurmountable problem for both students /workers and trainers/employers. In fact, both training programmes and job profiles could be based on specific national reference models (related to laws, recommendations, habits, etc.); thus, conceptual elements to be considered in order to identify the corresponding information probably would not match with the reference structure of the profile.