In the LLP area there are many short courses and qualification programs. However, to fulfil the principles of a Europe wide education it is neded to create a high level of comparability and cross-recognition of specific skills sets and qualifications. The European expansion and mobility leads to a mobility of the work force and to the importance of comparability, so that e.g. an innovation manager in every country of the EU covers the same set of skills and is tested against criteria agreed across all member states.
In the former EQN Leonardo networking project a guideline has been developed which regulates the quality of such pan-European industry education and created a skills and exam infrastructure applicable across all member states through an Internet supported environment.
Main principles are:

• Skills Sets: A defined set of quality criteria has to be followed to create the learning objectives and syllabus for new professions. Only skills sets which fulfil the defined criteria are accepted by the ECQA.
• Job Role Committees: European consortia are built per accepted professions to annually update the sills set and create a European wide test questions pool.
• European Test Pool : Assuming that a group of training bodies agreed the same skills set then students must be able to pass a test, independently from the region or country in a Europe wide scope. This is the reason why (supported by the former EQN project 2005 - 2007) a Europe wide pool of test questions for the developed skills sets plus European test portals which computer automate this test scheme have been set up and allow a cross-European Internet based collboration.
• Learning Environment: In this project the existing skills and exam portals are extended to an online campus for training of trainers and the multiplication of that approach into more training bodies and more regions in Europe.
• Defined Certification Rules and Procedures: The acceptance of professions and skills sets and the certification of students is based on defined quality rules and certification procedures.
  • Download the ECQA Guide

The objective of this project is to build on the established EU Certification and Qualification Association (www.ecqa.org, network for innovation in education, and pool of European professions applying the same quality and certification criteria in EU countries based on the European Qualification framework, Aug 2005 - July 2007, Leonardo Network) and to integrate the results from a European research project which developed an integrated selective online learning platform system (EPI . Educational Partnership through ICT, 2003 - 2005, ) to build an online learning system for all the professions for training organisations from 14 European countries.

At the moment ECQA (created by the former EU Leonardo networking project EQN, 2005 - 2007) supports skills assessment and certification and exam portals for 12 EU professions. In this project we plan

• to apply the certification principles (quality certificates) of the EQN project and select further 3 professions (in addition to the existing 12) needed by the industry to pursue the innovation principles and support the EU competitiveness agenda.
• to integrate the learning materials of the existing professions (12 professions) in the online EPI platform to support ICT based online training in an educational partnership between university and SME networks in Europe. (12 professions prepared and integrated into online learning)
• to establish a set of job role committees (one per accepted professions which satisfies the EQN quality criteria) to control a Europe wide agreed syllabus for the pool of professions to enable a Europe wide quality control. (15 job role committees established)
• to offer skills assessment and recognition of formal and non formal learning in the EPI IC solution for further 100 trainers in Europe in the IT and services sector . The trainers will then lead to an increased pool of online students (pool comprises approx. 2000 currently, we expect 400 more after the project).