BWP Special Edition 2005
Promoting Innovations in Vocational Education and Training - An Exchange of German Experiences
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Gisela Dybowski
Knowledge transfer through consulting - a service provided by BIBB in international vocational education and training
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The growing challenges facing international cooperation in vocational education and training (VET) are what prompted BIBB (Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training) five years ago to reposition itself in the field of international VET. The foundations for the Institute's medium-term activities in international VET were agreed in 2001 with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and laid out in a "Strategy paper on the internationalisation of VET".
Georg Hanf; Ute Hippach-Schneider
What purpose do national qualifications frameworks serve? - A look at other countries
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Looking at developments in other countries and at European level, this article outlines the objectives being pursued with the implementation of qualifications frameworks, what qualifications frameworks can do and possible approaches to them. Understood here as sets of skills, qualifications form the basic unit used in qualifications frameworks. Drawing on the examples provided by Ireland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the autors show how qualifications can be positioned in a hierarchical multi-level system with the help of descriptors in order to establish transparency and lateral mobility throughout an entire education system.
Ulrike Schröder
Learning foreign languages in companies that provide in-house vocational training - Exemplary strategies
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The importance of "Europeanizing" vocational training - and concomitantly the need to teach foreign languages on an occupation-related basis - has grown significantly in recent years. The work programme that was formulated on the basis of the Lisbon strategy and approved by the EU education ministers and the European Commission back in 2002 cites the promotion of foreign language learning as one of the 13 key objectives that European education policy is to implement by the year 2010.
Thomas Sondermann
The German Vocational Training Reform Act of 2005: What is new, what is different?
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The German system of dual vocational education and training enjoys worldwide recognition. To maintain this status, both the training and the legislation governing it have to keep pace with the challenges of the modern worldl. The Vocational Training Reform Act has comprehensively amended the Vocational Training Act of 1969 (BBiG) 1969) and the Vocational Training Promotion Act of 1981 (BerFiFG), and combined them into a single law. The objective of the reform is to secure and improve training opportunities for young people and to guarantee that each and every one of them - regardless of social or regional background - receives high quality vocational training. The Act entered into force on April 1, 2005. This article sets out the most important reforms.
Dietmar Zielke
Vocational Training Preparation - A new concept of vocational preparation for learning impaired and socially disadvantaged young people
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Vocational preparation schemes are in a state of upheaval. The present public employment services measures will merge into three qualification levels of a new concept. Up to now the legislators have formulated clearly delineated guidelines for vocational preparation schemes as an integral part of the Vocational Education and Training Act (BBiG) and introduced a new term for them, Vocational Training Preparation. This article will show some of the differences between Vocational Training preparation and the new concept of the public employment services. It will show some of the reasons for the existing differences and at the same time indicate some of the preconditions for resolving them.
Johannes Koch; Gert Zinke; Anke Bahl; Egon Meerten
What does it mean to provide process-oriented training?
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The new training regulations stipulate the demand for "process-oriented" implementation of training, with the goal of simplifying the adaptation of training to the requirements of industrial work processes and the rapid technological and organisational transformations. The current regulations specify business tasks which are described in general terms, and the enterprises have to provide the clear definition of the content themselves. This article describes the consequences for the implementation of training which arise from process orientation and designates the new tasks connected with it and the skills requirements for the personnel involved.
Dagmar Lennartz
The examinations field of action: interim evaluation and future prospects
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Examination can be a motive force and a supporter of system development but they can also be a restraint and a drag on it. In the past 30 years, examinations have placed both of those roles for "Training in Occupations". In the first ten years the were a central means of developing quality assurance in vocational education and training, but subsequently they increasingly came under fire from all sides. The dual system of vocational education and training was undergoing allround modernisation, but there was little change in examination practice. However, things have begun to move in the field of vocational examinations in the last five years. Innovations in examination models and examination structures have largely exhausted the possibilities of the traditional examination system. The changes in the examination system introduced up to now are therefore not the end but rather the beginning of an overdue process of reform.
Ursula Beicht; Hermann Herget; Günter Walden
Costs and benefits of in-company vocational training
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In-company vocational education and training activities are not an end in themselves. In fact, they should bring about concrete benefits for the company. Vocational training can therefore be seen as an investment which has to yield a worthwhile return on costs in the long term. In a study by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), a representative survey was conducted of some 2,500 companies involved in vocational training in the year 2001, in order to analyse the costs and benefits of training. It found that companies which directly provide in-company vocational training reap benefits on a substantial scale.