European Sound Specialist Education and Curriculum Exchange

"<< Background >>Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the live event industry harder than any other sector, we were facing a mass exodus of qualified personnel. At the same time, career perspectives and qualification offerings for specialisation (to help retain people for our industry) either meant leaving work for a multi-year stint in academia, or ""picking it up as you go"" as in the early rock'n'roll years. Needless to say, the latter approach is neither suited to the rapidly advancing technical demands and ever more abstract reasoning and troubleshooting skills required of today's sound engineers, nor to the changing labor market, where long-term mentoring relationships (which would enable such training on the job to progress to more advanced levels) are harder to come by.Meanwhile, as two partners were already rolling out national sound engineering qualifications at EQF level 5, we felt that a broadening of one's view and learning from one's peers throughout Europe would make those efforts better and more resilient. Lastly, we wanted to improve mobility for sound specialists by creating a common baseline of required competences that would enable sound engineering skills to be certified and recognized across borders.<< Objectives >>The core target of ESSENCE was a trans-national job and education profile for a European Sound Specialist (ESS) at EQF level 5. We wanted to understand the labor market demands and expectations of sound specialists in different countries, how sound engineering at this level is taught and certified there (specifically in places without or with a less pronounced EQF5 gap than in Germany), and how our emerging ESS vision would fit into those different VET cultures.For VDT as coordinating partner, our secondary goal was to develop skills in running projects under the ERASMUS+ framework and to learn from our partners, whose abilities in this area were already quite advanced. Traditionally, the educational focus of VDT had been limited to academia. Having witnessed dramatic shifts in work environment and conditions over the last decade, we began to understand the importance of vocational education and training in relation to the pursuing the social, aesthetic and sound quality ideals set out in our bylaws.Lastly, we wanted to build skills in dealing with established methods and tools for professional profiles in the European Union, most notably with the ESCO data structure and dictionary, to help with our own national VET projects.<< Implementation >>We conducted 10 transnational project meetings across all four partner countries. They were dedicated to learning about the host countries' cultural landscapes, typical event locations and their modes of operation, their VET cultures and the political structures governing them, and the VET providers (both public and private) offering qualifications in the live event industry.In order to disseminate our results and to solicit external input and feedback, we held 5 multiplier events co-located with major industry trade shows (MEET 2022 in Vienna, Austria, Prolight+Sound 2023 and 2024 in Frankfurt, Germany, Tonmeistertagung 2023 in Düsseldorf, Germany, and CUE 2024 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands).Work was mostly coordinated online, but we quickly found that face-to-face discussions were critical to overcoming certain roadblocks in the process. So we tacked extensive work sessions onto every project meeting and even scheduled one additional in-person workgroup meeting.In order to learn from other projects, we maintained (and still maintain) ties with the PACE-VET project, and drew extensively from the results of the TALQ, ETTE and TeBeVAT projects. We sent delegates to participate in meetings of the Creative FLIP project to learn about others' experiences with ESCO, monitored the progress of ETTE and the recent rollout of their safety passport program (see https://safetypassport.eu/) and contributed to and co-signed a Creative FLIP policy proposal to ESCO.<< Results >>The ESSENCE project kicked off with two preparatory projects, worked on by a subset of the partners each. The education providers among our group conducted a detailed review of existing qualification programs in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and collected the results in a written report. Additionally, we followed and discussed a similar program currently being rolled out in Sweden, but it was left out of the report as it was in its early planning stages. Meanwhile, the professional organisations represented in ESSENCE surveyed three groups of key stakeholders: (1) sound engineers already working at or above EQF5 as well as young aspiring colleagues interested in obtaining further qualification, (2) prospective employers looking to address the scarcity of qualified sound personnel at higher levels of expertise, and (3) artists, clients and producers interacting with sound engineers on a professional basis.Having concluded these preparatory surveys, we moved to designing the professional profile of a European Sound Specialist at EQF level 5 in term of their skills and competences, analysed the required underlying knowledge in order to compile a teaching syllabus, collected teaching materials and best practices to successfully train people in these skills, selected measurement methods to assess and certify the mastery of the required skills and competences, and created a database structure to hold these results and be amenable to future refinements and collaboration between related projects in our industry."