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3rd DRIVES Workshop on setting up of apprenticeships in the automotive sector
Continuing the series of webinars relating to the DRIVES project, today (Thursday 29th October) saw the first of 2 webinars relating to Apprenticeships. The purpose of this webinar was to share how the Apprenticeship programmes vary across the EU. Firstly, Norbert Schobel from the DG Employment, EU Commission gave the pan-European perspective highlighting the priorities at the Europe level and sharing some of the ambitions for the forthcoming Pact for Skills. This was followed by speakers from England and Portugal. David Sampson from the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education shared how the new Apprenticeship Standards have been set up in England with a re-energised focus of putting the employer at the heart of process. We heard that the emphasis on quality has effectively reduced the number of Apprenticeships by ensuring they represent meaningful job roles with at least one year of training. We then heard from Juan Pablo Riesgo from Spain who is partner at EY and has worked around education for many years. Juan Pablo shared how Apprenticeships work in Spain with the dual system that is common to some countries in the EU (but not all) where the responsibility for Apprenticeships is owned, in some cases, by the employers and, in others, by the technical schools.
Even with these differences though, what was more striking was the commonalities of the programmes and aspirations for the programmes between England and Spain and more generally across the EU. And finally there were a couple of talks on the DRIVES project itself. Jakub Stolfa, the DRIVES Project Coordinator gave a short overview of the DRIVES project including the sectoral intelligence and learning solution work streams. Then Mick Feloy highlighted some of the key points and actions from the Apprenticeship Marketplace report that he co-wrote and was a key deliverable of the Apprenticeship work stream. The actions include the creation of a Good Practise Resource and an Apprenticeship Comparison Tool enabling the programmes from different countries to be compared. Mick highlighted that new sources of Good Practise will be welcome which can be communicated through the feedback tool on the DRIVES web site at https://www.project-drives.eu/en/apprenticeship at the end of the Full Report (section 5.2).
The webinar is part of a set of webinars, organized under the European Vocational Skills Week umbrella, connected to the work under the ERASMUS+ Automotive Sector Skills Alliance - DRIVES project. You can access the recording of the presentation here and the presentation ppt at www.automotive-skills.eu.
