CEC has participated to the European Alliance for Apprenticeship Get together event by the European Commission in Brussels the 27/06/23.

During the panel “Apprenticeships as a means for social inclusion” CEC through Jean Buffenoir has presented the objectives and methodology of the project Skills for long term unemployed -SKY financed by the European Commission. Read here

Please find herewith the CEC testimony about the experiment that the partners project try to developed and structured in the framework of the SKY. 

The emergence of the European Reference Framework had a significant impact on the Member States' curriculum reforms by incorporating the competence approach in every educational and vocational programs. The development of competences into school curriculum frameworks and for lifelong learning has become a major policy imperative. Thus, competence has been divided down into a bunch of variation such as key competence, transversal competence, digital competence, social competence, and much more. Competence is the latest fashionable concept, used by all educational and vocational stakeholders but it has lost meaning for the jobseekers and the social exclude that are the public we deal with. Unemployed don’t understand the phrasing used by career advisor referring all the time to the word “competence”. What are your competences, which competences are you familiar with, can you describe your competences.” 

In the SKY project we don’t talk about competence, but we focus on activities truly done at the workplace. We have noticed that the workers when describing their occupation never talk about competence but explain with their own words: how they conduct a machine, handle a tool, follow the rules, report to the manager, etc. In fact, they talk about their professional gesture and attitude at work. SKY has taken into account the voice of the workers as the essential basis for designing training program. 

The permanent workers often say to the freshman “I’ll show you how to use that tool and you’ll gain more confidence after lot of practice time”. Practice at the workplace is the key for professionalization. The training delivered by the experimented worker is always a micro-training time aiming at giving only the sufficient fundamental skills and knowledge to the trainee to fulfil the tasks required by the employers. 

SKY, in a partnership of 5 EU countries, has develop micro-training programs only issued from observation and analysis of the professional gestures achieved at the workplace and commented by the workers themselves under the agreement of our partner companies.  It’s a bottom-up approach to deliver basic skills to the unemployed allowing them to quickly perform a simple work activity and being a friendly way of social inclusion into the job market. 

SKY is a sort of a very short-term apprenticeship system proposed to the unemployed that are fed up and reluctant to any kind of classic VET programs with learning content referring to rigid competence standards. 

SKY support social inclusion by setting a gentleman agreement between the applicant, the training provider, the guidance institutions, and the companies. The applicant is aware of what skills he/she will acquire in the micro-training with the testimonies of the permanent workers on the job activity (video of professional gesture). The company (workers and employers) is ready to welcome trainees in a dedicated workplace in deficit of workforce. The training providers have designed a micro-training session based upon practical learning outcomes on professional gestures and attitudes. The guidance institutions have developed new tools for selecting the applicant to the SKY project. 

The key point of the SKY apprenticeship relies upon the gentleman agreement between all the parties to facilitate social inclusion while attending a micro-training session committed to the concrete skills at a workplace. SKY is an innovative win-win system forecasting the advancement of micro-credentials for TVET.