ASSETs+ has designed 30 education & training programmes to provide trainees with new skills related to key technologies that will be expected in the Defence sector in the coming years.

The Alliance for Strategic Skills addressing Emerging Technologies in Defence (ASSETs+) was launched in 2020 with the aim to build a sustainable human resources supply chain for the European Defence Industry.

Since then, ASSETs+ has designed and developed 30 education & training courses at EQF levels 4, 5, 6 and 7, covering the Vocational Education and Training (VET) and Higher Education (HE) sectors, to respond to the labour market needs by upskilling their employees and attracting high skilled young workers.

The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) is an 8-level, learning outcomes-based framework for all types of qualifications that serves as a translation tool between different national qualifications frameworks. This framework helps improve transparency, comparability and portability of people’s qualifications and makes it possible to compare qualifications from different countries and institutions.

When we design courses, a certification system needs to be planned, in order to highlight the learning outcomes and, in some cases, quantify the workload by the ECTS or ECVET systems. The certification is a passport for employability as it describes the educational and professional paths, showing individual knowledge and competencies.

How does it work within the ASSETs+ project?

All the partners involved, industries, sectoral organizations, universities, VET providers and accreditation bodies, worked together to develop a certification model. As a result, the ASSETs+ awarding institutions (VET and HE institutions and industrial partners) issue a Certificate of Attendance, showing that the learner attended the course, and a Certificate of Achievement, which reflect the success in completing the final exam foreseen to assess the competences acquired.

Annexed to this, the “Certificate Supplement”, strictly related to the Europass Certificate Supplement, provides detailed information on the attended ASSETs+ course, to make it easier for employers, educational and vocational institutions to understand the value and the contents of the course. As for the learners, a certificate for teachers and trainers was developed, in order to give visibility and a clear understanding of the innovative teaching and training contents.

As such, the ASSETS+ certificates need to be in compliance with the national education and training systems of the countries involved. The ASSETs+ Certificate of Achievement takes into consideration the EU good practices on quality assurance as well as provide clear evidence of the achievement of a learner by also showing the essential information on the learning outcomes acquired through the issuing of the Certificate Supplement.

In addition, following the recent development at EU level, it is important to underline that the certification model designed within the ASSETs+ project was developed considering the recent Council Recommendation on a European approach to micro-credentials, which defines a micro-credential as: “the record of the learning outcomes that a learner has acquired following a small volume of learning”.

Thus, the courses that were developed, as well as the certification model itself, are based on a learner-centered approach, by putting an accent on the importance of the learning outcomes acquired by an individual.