Professional life and career development is increasingly determined by continuous learning to adapt to rapidly changing demands.

In the service sector, especially personal, social and organisational competences (SPOC) are necessary; thus becoming competitive factors at the job level.

This relates for instance to customer orientation, team work, cooperation, intercultural communication, flexibility but also entrepreneurial skills and planning competences.

These rather cross-cutting competences are mostly acquired in informal contexts outside educational institutions, e.g. by learning on the job or in other life-contexts.

As far as the validation of these competences is concerned an “off- the-shelf” assessment against curricula or standardised reference systems (e.g. on basis of EQF, ECVET and ECTS) is barely conceivable.
Hence formal validation is not suitable to display those personal and social competences that play a decisive role in the service economy

VITA is about to utilise a unique and innovative validation system (LEVEL5) for these competences to provide evidence of human potentials for learners, educational professionals and employers.