Abstract:

In a knowledge society and in a very competitive market, vocational education and training (VET) has a strategic importance for Luxembourgish companies. On the one hand companies need to have high qualified collaborators to stay competitive on their market. On the other hand employees want to maintain and to get competences that will ensure their employability. In this context, a strong pressure is put on Luxembourgish VET companies that have to be able to answer requirements of different stakeholders. To address this issue, they have decided to improve the quality of their management and services.
Quality of VET is not something new for Luxembourgish public and private VET companies, and for the Public Research Center Henri Tudor (CRP HT) that is working on this topic since 2006 Some VET companies have a detailed process of the educational lifecycle they work with. Others just do what they always have done without having an explicitly formulated process but having referenced documents that support their working practices. The training offer in Luxembourg is important and the customers do not know on which criteria they can make their choice. Initiatives exist among companies offering and demanding trainings to define a common framework to enhance the quality of training services, but these still refer to local initiatives.
In December 2008, the revision of the law concerning the vocational education and training mentioned the creation of a quality label, however, nothing has been done till today. In April 2010, different actors of the VET sectors in Luxembourg have met to exchange ideas about quality, taking into account the variety of quality approaches that has been developed and implemented in other European educational sectors. Since then, workshops have been organized with different results. During these workshops, the main need for quality came from private companies who want to be able to choose a training provider based on pragmatic quality criteria that will be relevant and shared among the market.
If generic standards, such as, EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) or ISO 9001 have been used in the educational community in other European countries, this is not the case in Luxembourg. In March 2011, a European standard, EN ISO/IEC 19796-1, has been nationally adopted due to its publication in the Luxembourgish Official Journal, but VET companies do not want to adopt ISO or European standards as they think a certification will be too expensive and as they do not see the added value of being certified.
However, CRP HT and VET companies are representing Luxembourg in the working group 5 “Quality assurance and Descriptive Frameworks” of the standardization sub-committee 36 (SC36) from ISO/IEC. CRP HT is also participating in a European Leonardo da Vinci project called Q-Cert-VET. This project develops a new quality standard for the vocational education and training (VET) sector. This standardization activity brings inputs to the work that has started in January 2012. From this date, different public and private actors have decided to start to define a national quality approach based on the current existing international and European approaches. They want to produce pragmatic and concrete methods and tools to improve the quality of educational lifecycle process, the quality of their services, and the quality of their management.

Keywords:

Vocational Education and Training, quality, certification.