The education and training landscape in Germany and Europe is facing upheaval. Changing conditions in the labor market are increasingly demanding more flexibility from employees and learners. As a result, current knowledge is losing its relevance at an increasingly rapid pace, and the importance of continuing education and training throughout life is rising. “Lifelong learning” is thus moving steadily into focus in the labor market. Making visible and assessing the skills acquired over the course of a working life currently poses many challenges for education providers, learners and employers.  Particularly in the international labor market segment of event technology, there is a lack of transferability of qualifications, structuring of the labor market and certification options to reflect the skills learned in everyday working life, especially since many employees in this industry have been active as lateral entrants for many years and are always confronted with rapid progress in the technologies used in the profession.

The basic idea of PACE-VET is to provide a digital infrastructure that will serve as a basis for the recognition and validation of competencies in the labor market for event technicians, thus enabling a better adaptation of vocational education and training to the needs of the labor market. Specifically, PACE-VET aims to create a certification process for gained competencies of workers by developing a digital platform for the collection of acquired certificates, using so-called micro-credentials (partial certificates). The solution is initially to be developed using the event technology labor market, which has been particularly affected by the Corona pandemic, as an example, but in the long term it will also be transferable to other industries by expanding the project’s partner network. Ultimately, the validation and recognition of non-formal and informal learning experiences at the European level through micro-credentials should contribute to a more inclusive, mobile and sustainable labor market in a fragile work environment.

First, an application is to be developed in cooperation with the partner organizations on the basis of a previously elaborated concept for a validation process, which is to serve as a platform for the mapping of acquired competencies and allows an EU-wide transfer of information about candidates and their acquired certificates. In the second step, micro-credentials from two specific learning fields will be elaborated and the validation process will be put into practice using a test group as an example. The resulting solutions and the documentation of their implementation will subsequently be made available for further use by third parties to enable easy replicability by interested parties from other business sectors as well. With the aim of reaching a broad group of stakeholders such as political institutions, chambers of commerce or companies, the project will be presented at several international trade fairs, conferences with education experts will be set up and the results will be disseminated through a variety of channels.