Project Description

Visible Skills of Adults (VISKA) is an Erasmus+ Key Action 3 Project, filed under the call priority theme of "Employment and Skills: validation of informal and non-formal learning in Education and Training." It is a three year project, running from March 2017 to February 2020 and is coordinated by Skills Norway. The research and evaluation partner of the VISKA project is Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland.

With this project, the seven partners in four countries address the European policy priority of diminishing skills mismatch by making knowledge, skills and competences of adults more visible through validation of informal and non-formal learning. In particular, VISKA addresses the need to make the skills of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and low-skilled adults more visible, in order to shorten their time to employment, targeted education and training offers and active engagement in society. Along with unemployed in general, these target groups are currently at a disadvantage in European societies and could greatly benefit from improved access to validation services and from more holistic validation arrangements.

The VISKA project plans to implement and evaluate five interventions, agreed by the partners and applied to the current processes (in the respective national contexts) for the validation of prior learning. The interventions have been developed and agreed with a view to making the knowledge, skills and competence of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and adults with low skills levels, more visible. While there will be differences across the participating countries in relation to validation policies, practices and infrastructures; the focus of the project team will be to learn how the chosen interventions, when enacted, can bring about real change, for individuals and systems and to collate the learning from the project to contribute to a broader policy agenda.

Planned Interventions for VISKA

The aim of the VISKA project

The VISKA evaluation has two main aims. The first is to understand, evaluate and enhance validation across the four participating countries. The evaluation also aims to provide country specific insights and case studies that can be analysed by policy makers seeking to understand the inherent challenges and opportunities within validation for low-skilled , migrants and refugees.

Through developing, trialling and evaluating these interventions:

  1. The processes to implement effective validation services, supporting networks and staff development will be mapped.
  2. The criteria, success factors and conditions of processes that contribute to outcomes of validation are identified.
  3. Case studies will be made available to be analysed by policy makers and other key policy influencers to understand key challenges and success factors in developing robust systems and processes in complex policy areas such as validation.
  4. The policy processes that play a role in influencing validation development will be identified and described.
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