How can we ensure trust in qualifications?

When can employers be confident that a person having achieved a qualification has the required competence? 

And when can individuals be confident that their qualifications have value on the labour market?

These are the questions we will work on in workshop 2 of the ETF conference ‘Making better Qualifications’, April 8 and 9 in Brussels.

Thorough quality assurance measures are needed to ensure trust in qualifications and indeed we see many partner countries introducing quality assurance systems, with a wide range of different approaches. But quality assurance systems can be costly and are not always effective. How can we achieve effective and cost-efficient quality assurance systems?

We want to explore what quality assurance of qualifications actually means in different countries; what measures do countries take to improve the quality of their qualifications? We are not looking for perfect comprehensive systems (the ‘nice to have’) but for minimum requirements to achieve mutual trust in qualifications in our partner countries (the ‘need to have’).

Can we agree on the indispensable basic elements of quality assurance systems for qualifications?

In this workshop Elizabeth Watters (ETF) and I will be working with Alexandra Kralikova, HR manager of Škoda (Czech Republic), Elene Jibladze, director of the National Centre for Educational Quality Enhancement (Georgia) and Teuta Danuza, Director, National Qualifications Authority (Kosovo). We will start with some findings of our study Making better Qualifications and we'll look at the EU tool  EQARF (European Quality Reference Framework). Alexandra will speak about trust in qualifications from the employer point of view and Elene will give us an example about how they deal with quality assurance of qualifications in Georgia.

This will set the scene for the main part of the workshop in which we want to explore together the various approaches and initiatives on quality assurance of qualifications.

Join the discussion about this topic already now. I would really like to hear your thoughts and experiences on how to ensure trust in qualifications.

Here are two basic questions to start with:

1. What is the most effective measure for quality assuring qualifications in your country and why is it effective?
2. If you could choose one element / measure / condition to improve the quality of vocational qualifications, what would you choose and why?

Share your thoughts and experiences. I will comment to your responses. I hope to start a fruitful dialogue on this platform which we will continue during the conference workshop!