Abstract:

A number of European Union priorities focus on sustained and shared approaches to making skills visible as well as supporting mobility of workforces within Europe including the integration of migrants and refugees. Supportive, transnational processes for the recognition and validation of learning provide an opportunity to maximise human capital and to benefit labour markets and societies generally leading to improved economic performance. The Visible Skills of Adults (VISKA) is an Erasmus+ Key Action 3 Project, filed under the call priority theme of “Employment and Skills: validation of informal and non-formal learning in Education and Training.” The project partners, from Norway, Iceland, Belgium-Flanders and Ireland will address European and national policy priorities by cooperating to make knowledge, skills and competences of adults more visible through consideration of the practice of validation of informal and non-formal learning and the implementation of some field trials. An initial mapping process of the national contexts has provided a baseline set of data on the existing processes, procedural information and resources related to the validation of learning of migrants /immigrants, refugees and those with low qualifications within partner jurisdictions and subsequently reflected into an EU context prior to implementation of various interventions planned by the project team. This vital relative information provides a context for the action-based interventions and a framework for the evaluation of the outcomes.

This paper details the five planned interventions drawn up by the project partners and the positions them in relation to the data collection processes and the potential for the project to contribute to policy at a local, national and European level. It addresses how well these interventions map to the European Guidelines for the Validation of Non-Formal and Informal Learning and inform the national responses to these guidelines, and previews the project outputs and outcomes The focus of this paper is to detail how the interventions relate to the evaluation of competence of low-skilled, migrants and refugees for the purposes of identifying further opportunities as informed by their existing knowledge, skill and competence.

Keywords:

Competence, mobility, learning, validation, recognition, skills, informal, non-formal, learning, life-long, knowledge, Erasmus +.