Background

European societies are more and more based on the service economy...

... hence professional lives are increasingly determined by the need for continuous learning to adapt to rapidly changing demands.

This may refer to new requirements on new jobs and professional fields that can sometimes hardly be satisfied by the "traditional" formal education systems like specific IT jobs.

Apart from these specific fields also the changing societies (from industrial to service economy) trigger a demand for specific key competences that are all based on social, personal and organisational competences.

These rather cross-cutting competences are in most cases acquired in informal contexts beyond formalised curricula.

VITA intends to link formal certification (EUROPASS) including formal and summative validation based on EQF with evidence of social and personal competence development which are essential in the service sector. For this purpose VITA will apply the formative LEVEL5 approach which has been developed in a series of LLP projects since 2005 to evidence development of SPOC and connect it with EUROPASS certification.

Furthermore, VITA will go beyond pure validation and integrate it in a holistic approach that enables different educational stakeholders to plan and evidence the acquisition of SPOC in different learning sectors.