CEDEFOP LAUNCHES A NEW DATABASE ON EUROPEAN POLICIES FOR APPRENTICESHIP

Apprenticeship policies are one of the key drivers of the European employment strategy the Commission is pushing to strenghten, with the objective to reach the targeted employment rate of 75% by 2020 and fight early school leaving.

In order to reach this objective, on 5 June CEDEFOP (European Centre for Development of Vocational Training) has launched an online platform collecting data concerning all policies and practices on apprenticeship in the European Union. The platform, organized in scheme/country fiches and comparison tables, provides a catchy and user-friendly tool to compare policies on apprenticeship in the European Union, plus a general framework on the state of art about the implementation of education and training policies for promoting employment in Europe.

The amount of data available, referring to information collected in 2016, gives us an immediate idea of the remarkable work behind this tool. Legislative gaps and fragmented or recent regulation on the matter in Member States made this work even harder and, for this reason, the available version, though impressive, has been released as a pilot version.

The functions allow, among others, to draw comparisons starting from single items between two or more countries, to consult schematic reports for each country and to have an immediate visual overview on the progress of apprenticeship policies in Member States with geographical maps.

The CEDEFOP’s platform is an effective tool to have an immediate understanding of the complexity and diversity of apprenticeship policies and applications across Europe, and gives a louder voice to the necessity of implementing regulations at national level, in accordance with the quality criteria set out by the European Council in the European Framework for Quality and Effective Apprenticeship.