Introduction

In a world that is increasingly defined by transnational mobility in almost every level, overcoming obstacles deriving from distinctions in educational systems is key to facilitating processes of economic and social inclusion and to prompting the employability of all. However, processes of recognition of learning certificates and skills are obstacles still frequently encountered by people throughout the world. In this context, the project One Block for Educational Credentials (OBEC) [1] primarily aims to explore the potential opportunities the innovative Blockchain (BC) technology may offer to revolutionize the educational field by simplifying and facilitating the issuing and validation of learning credentials across European countries in a unified and enforceable manner. Because BC creates an infrastructure in which certificates can be stored and issued while ensuring transparency, security, and verifiability, it has the ability to bring about positive effects especially for OBEC'S target groups, composed of migrants, exchange students, and people with alternative learning backgrounds (e.g., VET schools, work experience, training programs, and volunteering).

Establishing a system that can guarantee trust, transparency, and reliability in a holistic manner in a transnational context is a challenge our societies must adequately address, as currently standardization of student records in Europe is still limited to institutions utilizing ECTS or ECVET, and even those systems face problems of their-own. Consequently, outdated credential systems limit our ability to create new pathways to education, in particular for those who lack access and need it most.

Indeed, the favouring of evidence of skills and learning achievements earned through formal education over informal and non-formal learning experiences may harm people’s ability to enrol in higher-education institutions or to assess the labour market. Additionally, due to differences among national educational systems, migrants are commonly faced with long and difficult processes to recognize their certifications and skills. Such obstacles lead to delays in their integration into the host country’s labour market, also possibly rendering unfeasible the possibilities of practicing their professions. In fact, more than 40% of the employed highly-educated third-country nationals work below their qualification levels in the EU (European Commission, n.d.) This failure in promoting a fast and full integration of migrants in the labour market consequently hinders their ability to fully utilize their skills and realize their economic potential to positively impact the EU economy and societies.

In this context, BC technology may offer a unique opportunity to overcome this issue of our current certification systems by creating revolutionary recognition tools in the EU. Emerging from the perception that such revolution is key to enabling people to move freely across countries while fulfilling their full economic and personal capabilities and aspirations, OBEC’s first Intellectual Output (IO1) focused on research of knowledge gaps and the current state of economic and social integration of the target groups (migrants, exchange students and people with alternative learning backgrounds). 

This report summarizes the results of the first part of IO1 (called block A1), explaining how the data was gathered and which conclusions could be drawn from such data. Moreover, a birds-eye view of the current European situation concerning the recognition of educational competences and/or abilities of individuals is provided. The overall aim is to clearly identify the barriers faced by members the different target groups when they try to get recognition for their competences and/or abilities.

 

Methodology and Aims 

The data has been collected through live interviews and online surveys. A common survey has been employed by all partners, while for live interviews a general template with specific information that had to be gathered was employed. The data was then analysed through the use of desk-based analysis, grouping the answers according to the issues they reported and selecting the statistically most relevant ones (i.e., the ones that were reported by most individuals and/or institutions). While quantitative results have been provided where appropriate, the main aim was to obtain a qualitative evaluation of the current European situation concerning educational credentials. Thus, priority had been given to qualitative assessments rather that numerical analysis. The qualitative assessment has also been summarized through the use of key words that were used to name the barriers faced by the relevant demographics when trying to get recognition for competences and/or abilities across the EU.

In order to properly deal with the data of IO1, information was analysed separately for individuals and supporting institutions, each one containing elements pertaining to a specific goal of IO1.

For Block A1 of IO1, supporting institutions (including higher-education institutions, VET schools, and other training programs), students participating in an exchange program, as well as individuals with migrant and non-formal educational background were interviewed in order to obtain an overview of the main obstacles to validating educational credentials. In this effort, the partnership explored existing tools to validating educational credentials in their countries. Each partner was responsible for gathering data related to their own countries (those countries were: Sweden, Belgium, Croatia and Italy). For each part of the A1 Block, the partnership had different aims.

For individuals, the aim was to identify the following information:

1. The status of such individuals: their background and aims.
2. Potential obstacles they faced while trying to achieve their aims.

 

For institutions, the aim was to identify the following information:

1. The status of the institutions: their structure and aims.
2. The tools and frameworks they employ to evaluate the capacities/competences of the individuals they support (or employ in case of a private employers).
3. The potential obstacles they faced while trying to evaluate the capacities/competences of the individuals they support (or employ in case of a private employers).

 

Data Gathered

For individuals of Block A1, 126 different individuals have been interviewed/surveyed. Of those, 45 were categorized as migrants, 46 as students participating in an exchange study program and 35 as individuals who followed an alternative educational background.

The migrants came from 23 different countries, spanning four distinct continents (there were no interviewees from Oceania). Of those, 62% had a higher-education degree (a Bachelor degree or higher) and only 14% had no formal education.

The exchange students were from 13 different countries and performed their exchange period in 16 different countries, spanning over all five continents. 78% of the interviewees completed some form of formal courses during their exchange period, which spanned a wide variety of topics.

The individuals with alternative educational backgrounds all performed some kind of integrating educational activity through both public  and private institutions. Only one interviewee reported that s/he acquired his/her competences through working experiences. As with the exchange students, the topics covered during those courses were varied.

The quantity and quality of the data allowed the partnership to get a really good insight into the potential issues faced by the different target groups of the OBEC project.

For institutions [2] of Block A1, 26 different institutions have been interviewed/surveyed. Of those, 10 provided support to migrants, 9 provided support to exchange students and, finally, 7 provided support to people with an alternative educational background.

For the institutions that provided support to migrants, 40% were Non-Governmental Organizations that helped to train incoming migrants in order to insert them in the job market. The remaining 60% were actual private companies employing those migrants.

For the institutions that provided support to exchange students, those were all Erasmus offices inside Universities that helped their students both during the outgoing phase and, subsequently, when they were returning to their Alma Mater.

For the institutions that provided support to people with an alternative learning background, two educational institutions were interviewed (one public and one private), while the remaining ones were institutions that helped the target individuals to get access to the job market.

As with the individuals, the variety of different institutions interviewed allowed for a subsequent high quality analysis of the current EU situation concerning the recognition of competences and/or abilities.

 

Naming the Barriers

Individuals' Perspective 

Through the interviews/surveys submitted to the individuals of the three target groups described in the previous section, some patterns concerning common issues faced by those individuals emerged. Only the major issues faced by the individuals of each target group will be indicated. Those issues should not be seen as unique; they are simply the ones that were reported most often by those individuals and thus represent the ones that are perceived as the most relevant by them. Another important aspect to note is that those issues might have already been identified by policy makers and solutions to those might already exist. Nonetheless, it should be understood that those individuals still feel like those issues are hindering their possibility of participating actively in the environments in which they live.

 

Lack of Standards

This first issue was reported by 57% of all the migrants that faced problems when trying to get recognition for their competences/abilities. Those individuals faced difficulties in obtaining recognition for their educational and job experiences, mostly due to cross-national differences between the country in which they performed their courses/work and the country they migrated to. Some of the interviewees reported that even though they managed, in the end, to solve their problems, the whole process required important economical and time investments. 

 

Lack of Automatization

This second issue was reported by 67% of the exchange students that completed some formal exams during their exchange period. They reported that they had issues when trying to get recognition for those exams when they returned to their alma mater. In particular, the interviewees reported that their issues were generated by miscommunication between their home institutions and the host institutions. This meant that those students were not able to properly understand which courses they could take abroad and how would they be recognized once they returned to their home institutions. As with migrants, even though the students reported that, at the end, they managed to solve their issues, the whole process of solving them was extremely time consuming and caused delays in the completion of their degrees, slowing down their possibility of actively participating in the labor market.

 

Lack of Certifications

This last issue was reported by 34% of the individuals with an alternative educational background. In particular, the interviewees reported that they had issues related to not having any formal certifications that could guarantee to potential employers that they indeed possessed the competences/abilities they claimed to possess and thus were not believed when they reported such competences/abilities in their curricula. They reported that this greatly hindered their possibility of finding a job, thus making it difficult for them to become active citizens.

 

Institutions' Perspective

An interesting result obtained during this first phase of the OBEC project is that while some issues reported by the individuals are also indicated by the institutions that support them, other issues are not perceived as existing. This indicates that there exists a misalignment between what the individuals and the institutions perceive as problematic. This, in itself, should be seen as an issue because whenever a supporting institution does not realize that there is an issue that individuals face, it will not act in order to facilitate solutions to such issue. Of the main three issues reported by the individuals, the lack of standards and the lack of certifications was also indicated by the institutions, while the  lack of automatization was not perceived as an issue. In fact, institutions providing support to students participating into an exchange program did not report any issue at all. On top of those issues, another important specific issue was reported by the institutions, even though the individuals did not report it during their interviews. The institutions (the ones providing support to migrants and persons with an alternative educational background) reported that the individuals they provided support to (mostly foreign individuals) had problems expressing their competences and/or abilities in the local language. This slowed down the process of recognizing those competences/abilities, since it took time to identify them in the first place. We will call this last issue language barrier.

 

European Potential Solutions

The EU developed (and still develops) various tools that could aid individuals in their endeavour of getting recognition for their competences and/or abilities. The reader will easily realize that most of those tools were developed exactly to tackle some of the issues that were reported in the previous sections. However, the interviews carried out inside the OBEC project highlight that those are not always employed and/or known by those individuals. It is therefore necessary to improve the dissemination of information concerning those tools, especially towards the supporting institutions. In fact, as it will be shown, some of the tools developed could potentially solve exactly those issues that have been reported by both individuals and supporting institutions, meaning that both categories were unaware of the existence of those tools (which is particularly worrisome for the institutional part). Even though the tools here presented are all designed to help with the recognition of competences and/or abilities, they will be split into professional and educational tools. The former are tools that are designed for persons that seek recognition for competences/abilities developed outside formal education institutions, while the latter are designed for competences/abilities developed following a traditional educational path.

 

Professional Tools

There are at least two important elements in the European strategy for the recognition of skills and competences: 1) The ESCO system, and 2) the Europass format for CVs. Both will be discussed in turn in order to understand their main characteristics and how they are employed to help individuals get recognition for their skills and competences.

The main tool developed by the European Union (EU) with reference to the recognition of skills and qualifications is the ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) system. Such system is part of the Europe 2020 strategy and has the aim of providing a platform that put in contact jobseekers with potential employers, highlighting the skills and competences that are required by the former in order to fulfil the demands of the latter. The main advantage of the ESCO system is that it eliminates part of the language barriers that could affect the possibility of an individual to enter the job market of a foreign country. In particular, the ESCO system allows to provide more refined information about certain professional experiences that individuals could indicate in their CVs. What the ESCO system does is to break down a specific profession into skills, competences and qualifications that are characteristic of such profession, allowing employers to better understand the qualities of a potential employee. At the current state, ESCO can provide services in 27 different languages and can map almost 3000 occupations to more than 13000 different skills.

Concerning the occupations, those are classified employing the ISCO-08 codes. ISCO-08 is the International Standard Classification of Occupations. The ISCO-08 system provides a hierarchical structure to different professions, mapping together different major and subgroups of professions. ESCO then maps specific professions to ISCO-08 codes, in order to further refine the classification of a profession. In particular, the ISCO-08 system provides the first four layers of classification of the professions, while the ESCO codes will always be found at the fifth level or lower. In ESCO, each occupation is mapped to exactly one ISCO-08 code, thus ESCO occupation concepts can be equal to or narrower than ISCO unit groups, but not broader. The result is a strictly mono-hierarchical structure where each element at level 2 or lower has exactly one parent.

Concerning the skills, in the ESCO system there is a distinction between i) skills/competence concepts and ii) knowledge concepts. It must be noted that in the ESCO system no distinction is made between skills and competences. As with occupations, also for skills a hierarchical structure is provided, starting from a general subdivision into 1) knowledge, 2) skills, 3) attitudes and values, and 4) language skills and knowledge. From this initial subdivision, further specifications for the concepts are provided, gradually offering a more refined description of specific skills that the individual might possess.

Finally, concerning the qualifications, ESCO provides a guide to understand what kind of skills are acquired by a given individual who can complete a specific examination. This is because the infrastructure offered by the ESCO system is flexible enough to offer mapping possibilities for various educational activities and, thus, can offer a proper evaluation of skills. This could aid different educational institutions to understand what must be examined and how to examine it, allowing the successful candidate to obtain recognition of specific skills that can then be employed in the labour market to connect with potential employers.

All of this, coupled with the fact that the ESCO system is open access and free of charge, makes it an incredible tool to foster mobility and networking across Europe for all the members of the target groups of OBEC.

Another important tool that helps in the recognition of competences and skills inside the European Union is the standardized European Curriculum Vitae (Europass). Europass offers a way to describe and organize the information about the competences and skills of an individual. Thanks to the Europass format, the individual will be able to identify the correct typologies of information and present them appropriately, without barriers caused by language and/or culture. For example, as soon as the individual recognizes a specific job s/he performed and/or skill s/he possesses, the Europass format allows him/her to select the specific information, taking care of further analysing the details through the tools previously described when the ESCO system was introduced. Moreover, the Europass format allows the individual to prepare standardized cover letters, helping them presenting them-selves to potential employers. Finally, it is possible to upload diploma supplements (to provide proofs of possessed academical qualifications) and certificate supplements, which allows to showcase vocational qualifications acquired during internships and/or training courses carried out inside the EU.

Those two professional tools are incredibly important for the two issues of the lack of standards and the language barrier. The first issue is tackled through the use of international standards for the classification of competences/abilities with respect to specific jobs performed and/or educational courses completed. The second issue is tackled in particular through the use of the automatic translations that could be performed employing the ESCO system.

 

Educational Tools

There are at least five important elements in the European strategy for the mobility of students and the recognition of knowledge across different national educational frameworks: 1) The Erasmus + project, 2) the Bologna Process, 3) the EQF system, 4) the introduction of the Dublin Descriptors, and 5) the introduction of the Diploma Supplements. All will be discussed in turn in order to understand their main characteristics and how they are employed to help individuals to move across different educational systems and get recognition for their knowledge.

The whole system of higher education has always been a key priority of the European Union (EU). One of the most relevant occurrences that shows the centrality of higher education inside the EU is the creation of the Erasmus project (which eventually evolved into the Erasmus+ project in 2014). The Erasmus project began in 1987 and its aims were extremely simple: to increase the magnitude and quality of student exchange study periods in universities outside their home country. Since its creation, the program had a great success. Even looking at just 2019, almost 940000 persons studied, trained or volunteered outside their home country through an Erasmus project, with numbers that are steadily growing through the years [3].

A second important step in the direction of fostering a unified system of education came with the Bologna Process. Starting with the Sorbonne and Bologna declarations, the Bologna Process was a response to the demands of the national governments of the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) with respect to the mobility of students and graduates. Its aims were to create a convergence in the different national educational systems in order to promote mobility and facilitate translations between formal titles across Europe. The main take away from the Bologna process is the structuring of higher education into three distinct cycles which are specified in terms of learning outcomes, i.e., statements of what students know and can do on completing a specific degree. In particular, in describing the cycles, the qualification framework introduced through the Bologna process specifies the amounts of credits (as defined by the European Credits Transfer and Accumulation System, ECTS) that are required in order to complete a given cycle [4]: typically, 180–240 ECTS credits for a bachelor’s degree, and 60–120 ECTS credits for a master’s degree. The framework also includes a third cycle, corresponding to a Doctoral degree, which, however, does not specify the number of credits required.

This framework can also be put into comparison with another framework employed to specify the levels of qualification of individuals, i.e., the European Qualification Framework (EQF) system. Inside the EQF there are eight different reference levels describing what a learner knows, understands and is able to do, i.e., their learning outcomes. The EQF system is more comprehensive compared the framework introduced by the Bologna process, since it includes also non-higher levels of formal education (e.g., secondary school diplomas). However, the last three levels of the EQF (6th through 8th) correspond exactly to the three cycles introduced by the Bologna process.

A fourth important element in the recognition of skills and competences in the educational field are the Dublin Descriptors. The Dublin Descriptors offer generic statements of typical expectations of achievements and abilities associated with awards that represent the end of each of a (Bologna) cycle or level. The descriptors are phrased in terms of competence levels, not learning outcomes (thus they complement, rather than substitute the Bologna cycles), and they enable to distinguish in a broad and general manner between the different cycles. A level descriptor includes the following five components: i) Knowledge and understanding, ii) Applying knowledge and understanding, iii) Making judgements, iv) Communication, v) Lifelong learning skills.

Note that the Dublin descriptors are neither compulsory nor they represent minimal benchmarks. They simply indicate what kind of competences should a student acquire after completing a course inside a specific (Bologna) study cycle.

Finally, the last element which was implemented to facilitate the mobility of international students across Europe was the Diploma Supplement (and its sibling, the certificate supplement). The diploma supplement is a document accompanying a higher education diploma (certifying the completion of one of the Bologna cycles) providing a standardised description of the nature, level, content, and status of the studies completed by its holder. The diploma supplement is designed as an aid to support the recognition of academic qualifications and includes eight elements providing information about: i) the holder of the qualification, ii) the qualification type and its originating institution, iii) the qualification level, iv) the content of the course and results gained, v) function of the qualification, vi) certification of the supplement, vii) details of the national higher education system concerned (provided by the National Academic Recognition Information Centres (NARICs)), and, finally, viii) other relevant details. Along with a diploma supplement, certificate supplements could also be provided, which provide information similar to that of a diploma supplement, but in relation to vocational qualifications acquired during internships and/or training courses carried out inside the EU.

All those elements give their contribution to the creation of a standardized system that can facilitate the transfer of competences and abilities across different European countries. Moreover, they make it easier to extra-European individuals to compare their national qualifications with the ones present in the different European countries, without having to perform the comparison each time they travel to a different European country.

All those tools are well suited to deal with the lack of automatization and the lack of certifications issues. For the former kind of issues, students shall be made aware of all those tools during their studying experiences, facilitating their understanding of what is required from them while travelling across countries for their exchange programs. However, what is also required is that educational institutions adhere to the standards imposed by those tools in the most accurate way possible, in order to avoid confusion and miscommunication across different institutions. For the latter kind of issues, supporting institutions should design examining procedures based on the standards provided by the tools indicated in this section; those procedures could then be used to assess whether an individual does or does not possess the competences/abilities that s/he reports.

 

Conclusion

In this first phase of the project, the partnership focused on the identification of common issues faced by individuals that try to get recognition of competences and/or abilities they acquired during their life experiences (through education, professional experiences, and general activities they performed during their lifetime). It has been noted that most of the issues that individuals face already have existing solutions inside the EU, but that those individuals are not aware of them or simply do not use them to solve their problems. Moreover, it appears to be a misalignment between the issues that are perceived as relevant by those individuals and the institutions that should support them. We believe that this might cause problems when inclusion of those individuals in the labour market inside the EU is taken into consideration. The major problem is that social inclusion is slowed down and some of those individuals enter the job market in positions that are underqualified for their expertise. More tools that are easy to use and understand should be developed alongside the ones already developed by the EU. Those tools should help those individuals get recognition for their competences/abilities in short time frames and allow potential employers to understand clearly which kinds of individuals they are dealing with, thus being able to fit them in positions that are of the appropriate level for their preparation. OBEC’s objective is specifically that of exploring potential tools for the recognition of educational credentials through the use of Blockchain technologies and open badges. We believe that having an automatic system that could be carried around the world – which is secure, transparent and trustworthy – could play a crucial role in solving some of the problems that have been highlighted in the previous sections of this report.

 

[1] The partnership consists of five different institutions: SwIdeas AB (the leader of the project) based in Sweden; Eurada based in Belgium; Simora based in Croatia; Lai-Momo and the University of Urbino, both based in Italy.

[2] Note that even though we categorized some institutions as support providers for specific target groups, they often provide support to multiple of those target groups, especially when migrants and people with alternative educational background are taken into consideration. For this reason, some of the results that are presented later in this report might be slightly biased by the experiences of those institutions.

[3] https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/about/statistics_en.

[4] There is no strict consensus on how much work corresponds to one ECTS credit. However, it is generally assumed that one ECTS credit corresponds to 25/30 hours of study, including class attendances.