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The Project

The mobility of trainees increases their chances in the European labour market, strengthens their personality and develops a European identity. However, until now there have been many obstacles to overcome before an internship abroad for trainees will be as natural as it is for university students.

Within the project THEME instruments that simplify carrying out the stays abroad, should be created or improved. Moreover, the quality of mobilities abroad should be secured and their verification and recognition should be improved. Hereby, a network of committed partners in the European vocational education was established.

Competence matrices, which are available for the field of trade, hospitality, electrical engineering and mechatronics were structured in sub-competences, which can directly be taken for the learning agreement, the assessments and the Europass, suitable also for short-time mobilities.

A database on the basis of the results of the E.R.M.E.S. project provides a practical instrument for this purpose.

Altogether carrying out mobilities and the transparency between the different vocational systems has been improved.

Summary

The mobility of VET students is important to open their mind for the European labour market as a whole and to increase their chances for future qualified employment.
However, the different VET systems with their country-specific rules and ideas as well as the lack of transparency and comparability that complicates the recognition and validation are still big obstacles for VET students` mobilities. Another barrier is the time consuming organization of mobilities, especially with the ECVET tasks.
In order to increase mobility, it is necessary to overcome the obstacle of the different systems and to improve the instruments to organize and manage mobility.
The project THEME aimed to support VET teachers or exchange coordinators by offering instruments to facilitate their work. Furthermore it aimed to assure the quality of VET mobility and to contribute to its validation and recognition regarding the ECVET guidelines.

For this purpose the project intended to connect results of the projects TRIFT, E.R.M.E.S and ECMO. It helped to set up synergy effects between these projects and to transfer, disseminate, evaluate and possibly improve the existing approaches and tools. The focus was on the occupational fields of electronics/electrical engineering, mechatronics, trade and hospitality.

The effects of the project were improvements of carrying out mobilities, improvement of transparency between the different vocational systems, improvement of the verification and recognition, therewith a simplification and expansion of European mobility in the vocational education as well as a continuation of the ECVET process.

The target groups of the project are teachers that are responsible for mobility at vocational colleges, trainees whose mobility will be simplified and companies that will benefit from a better transparency.

The consortium of the project consists of twelve institutions from eight European countries, working in four working groups.  There are vocational colleges, chambers, different governmental institutions of the vocational education and training and one university.

Description

THEME is based on successful projects in the sectors of electronics/electrical engineering and mechatronics (VQTS I and II), hospitality (ECMO) and trade (TRIFT) as well as the project E.R.M.E.S., in which a database has been developed and tested to manage mobilities.

In TRIFT and ECMO outcome-oriented learning units have been defined by using the VQTS matrix. The results of TRIFT show that during a traineeship the competences of a whole Competence Development Step can rarely be acquired and that it would be helpful to develop descriptors or to subdivide the competences into Partial Competences. The project intended to evaluate and adapt the existing competence matrixes in the mentioned occupational fields and develop Partial Competences.
The project THEME intended to analyze and adapt existing matrices in the fields of trade, hospitality, electronics and mechatronics. Furthermore it intended to develop Partial Competences. A lot of  partners were involved in this process. This procedure assured a broad dissemination of the idea of matrices and Partial Competences. Additionally, there has been  a broad acceptance, because representatives of different vocational education systems and levels were involved.

The development of Partial Competences for all Competence Areas inside the matrices was not possible throughout the duration of the project. Therefore we focused on those Core Work Processes / Competence Areas that are extremely relevant for internships. In a first step the Partial Competences has been developed for these chosen Competence Development Steps. The latter is the basis for the VET students’ learning agreements and their EUROPASS mobility.

The outcome-oriented assessment instruments developed in TRIFT has been disseminated in further countries and into other occupational fields.

The database developed in the E.R.M.E.S. project has been complemented by the contents of existing matrices in the respective fields and provides Competence Profiles and Partial Competences as the basis for facilitating the management of mobilities.

Assessment tools can be generated by the database in assessment forms. This leads to a standardisation and facilitation of the mobility procedures and an improvement of their quality, based on the ECVET process.

All instruments has been tested in VET students’ mobilities. The consortium consisted of different VET institutions, chambers, a university specialized in VET and a regional authority in VET and thus ensured a broad variety and quality of partners.