Impacts for policy and research in European VET

The political and economic benefits of an international large-scale assessment of Vocational Education and Training are obvious. In a Europe marked by rapid technological and economic development and increasing knowledge intensity in working processes, educational processes have changed. In order to safeguard and develop competitiveness and social cohesion, Europe’s citizens must constantly update their competences to perform successfully in their jobs and lead a life that satisfies them in social and cultural terms. VET systems have gained importance for providing competencies relating to occupational mobility and independent lifestyle of young people as well as international competitiveness and innovativeness of enterprises.

The European Commission has put forward the ambitious economic and social goal of becoming “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”. In the field of VET this aim is being pursued through the Copenhagen Process. The European Commission’s proposal for a European Qualifications Framework (EQF) offers opportunities to increase mobility and enhance permeability between educational sectors. In the Helsiki Communiqué (2006), Education Ministers stressed that in the next few years; work would focus on introducing the EQF and a credit system with view to achieving grater mobility for trainees in Europe and, by means of closer cooperation in VET, further developing VET systems.

The main benefit of a VET-LSA is to expand the knowledge for steering VET processes at different policy levels, e.g., national/international administration, public relations, and educational institutions.

From a political and pragmatic perspective, VET-LSA will increase valid and reliable steering knowledge:

to determine the relationship between individual/biographic characteristics, training forms and skill building;
to improve transparency regarding the performance of European VET-programmes;
to link VET-outcomes and institutional orders of VET-systems;
to determine the correlation between the competences certified in final examinations and competences actually measured;
to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of different training forms in different countries as an opportunity to learn from one another;
to classify different vocational training qualifications in international classification schemes (ISCED; EQF) in order to support the comparability of certification processes at the European level;
and others.

From a scientificperspective, the results of VET-LSA will:

improve hypotheses and research tools for measuring the performance of vocational competencies in a longitudinal and cross-sectional study;
support statements regarding the interrelation of competence levels, training forms and context variables;
provide findings on the interrelation between individual vocational competences and performance at work;
and others.