Providing Micro-Credentials and validation processes for the recognition and certification of compences in the labour market of event technicians.
This month in December 2021 the project PACE-VET was started. The basic idea of PACE-VET is to provide a digital infrastructure that will serve as a basis for the recognition and validation of competences of event technicians, thus enabling a better adaptation of vocational education and training to the needs of the labour market.
The project is a response to a major upheaval in the European education and training landscape: Changing framework conditions on the labour market increasingly demand more flexibility from workers and learners, current knowledge is losing relevance more and more quickly and the importance of further education and training throughout a work-life is therefore increasing. Making this lifelong learning visible and assessable presents many challenges for providers, learners and employers. Especially in the international labour market segment of event technology, there is a lack of transferability of qualifications, structuring of the labour market and certification opportunities to reflect the competences learned in everyday work. One reason is that many workers in this sector are active as lateral entrants for many years and are always confronted with rapid progress in the technologies used in the profession.
In concrete, PACE-VET aims to create a certification process for gained competences of workers by developing a digital platform to collect acquired certificates, using so-called micro-credentials (partial certificates): First, an application will be developed in cooperation with the partner organizations, which is to serve as a database for mapping acquired competences and allows for an EU-wide transfer of information on candidates and their acquired certificates. In the second step, micro-credentials from two specific learning fields will be elaborated.
The solution is initially to be developed as an example in the event technology sector, which has been particularly affected by the Corona pandemic, but in the long term it will also be transferable to other sectors by expanding the project’s partner network. The resulting solutions and the documentation of their implementation are subsequently made available for further use by third parties in order to enable easy replicability by interested stakeholders from other sectors of the economy 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, specialist conferences with education experts will be set up and the results will be disseminated through a variety of channels. Ultimately, the validation and recognition of non-formal and informal learning experiences at European level through micro-credentials should contribute to a more inclusive, mobile and sustainable labour market in a fragile work environment.
The project is carried out on behalf of BF/M Bayreuth (Betriebswirtschaftliches Forschungszentrum für Fragen der mittelständischen Wirtschaft e. V.) with help of the European partners VLTP (Germany), Erasmushogeschool Brussel (Belgium), OSAT (Netherlands) and STEPP (Belgium).
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