PROMOTE - Promoting and Validating Key Competences in Mobility and Traineeships in Europe

The project aims at promoting and validating social, personal and organisational key competences such as entrepreneurship, civic competences and learning to learn with the help of an innovative, self-directed learning approach at the interface of higher education and business.Social and personal key competences are hardly to be acquired in lectures, frontal teaching and self-learning.The ideal learning contexts to develop these competences are informal/non-formal learning contexts such as learning in mobility and in traineeships.However, up to now only singular attempts have been made to assess these competences, to give evidence of their development in the learning activity, to connect them to existing certification systems and to offer a European wide validation approach.PROMOTE has developed and piloted an approach to tackle this issue based on a long term partnership of academia, business and educational partners from all over Europe.The traineeships involving learners from 15 institutions, including universities, businesses and public authorities has been piloted in different EU member-states. The innovative momentum of these internships was that they work along a project management structure; each trainee had to plan, develop and assess his or her project, which lead towards at least one of the key competences described above.In the framework of the project well-proven evaluation approaches (6 LEVEL5 projects, EDUCCKATE) were applied to assess and evidence informal learning in different mobility learning environments and traineeships.