Started in 2016, the RECTEC project aims at promoting employability by identifying transversal skills and matching them with professional certifications. Managed by the GIP-FCIP of the Académie de Versailles (France), it brings together actors from the field of professional training and integration from three French-speaking countries: Belgium, France and Luxembourg.

The RECTEC project is an answer to the need of workers from the fields of education, training, certification and career exploration to have assessment tools with both qualitative gradings and correspondence with the European Qualifications Framework (EQF)*. This need comes from the principles guiding the securing of career paths, according to which a graded system allows for a better visualization of one’s positioning and/or progress.

RECTEC’s main challenge is to create and put to use a competency reference guide that would be common to the whole system of actors working in the professional training and integration fields. Graded skill proficiency scales allow us to acknowledge partially mastered skills and to identify those to be developed to reach EQF’s level 2, 3 or 4.

The elaboration of this reference guide is based on the work of AEFA France* (European Agenda for Adult Learning) which developed an approach that included and graded skills from both the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)* and the Key Competences for lifelong learning. Particular attention is paid to the so-called “basic” skills, which are named and integrated in the transversal skills. The logic of progression follows an approach by situations, promoting links between experience, activities and skills on one side, and factual and guided self-assessment by beneficiaries on the other.

Skills are also calibrated using two other criteria defined in the EQF: autonomy and responsibility, at levels corresponding with activities and jobs from the first four levels of the EQF.

The collective elaboration of the intellectual production was done in three steps:

1. Creation of a consensual competency reference guide whose scales followed the EQF’s first four levels.
2. Experiments monitored and analysed with a protocol developed by Ingrid de Saint-Georges from the University of Luxembourg.
3. Formalization in this handbook of the most frequent uses and goals identified during the experiments.