On February 23rd, 20 career counsellors from LLL centers from all over the country came together to work on development in the field of adult guidance. The VISKA project was introduced and an analysis for a training module for front-line professional, involved in delivering Validation of Prior Learning (VPL), was conducted.
In Iceland all professionals (counsellors, assessors and project managers) working in VPL projects (for low-qualified people) need to take a two day course before working on VPL. In the VISKA project there will be a specific focus VPL for migrants which has not been done before in Iceland. It´s necessary to develop a special training module for professionals working with the target group. Professional front-line staff need their competences to be up to date in order for them to better meet the needs of diverse target groups for VPL. Hopefully this will result in an increased access to validation processes for migrants, fair validation results and successful guidance towards career development.
The analysis showed that the professionals‘ multicultural competence needs to be a priority. They also need to learn how to work with interpretors as well as learning about the tools which will be used in VISKA for documenting and assessing competences. In addition to this they need to learn about the possibilities for the migrants to get their formal education evaluated.
A Training module/course will be developed in the coming months, based on the results of the analyses. Validation staff linked to the VISKA project will go through their „new“ training before the Field trials begin in autumn, 2018.