The MENON Network EEIG and the KITE partnership is honoured and pleased to invite you to attend the European expert round table that will be held the 10th of October 2006 at the premises of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

The expert round table will take place with the cooperation of the Oxford University Department of Educational Studies, OUDES.

This round table is designed as a platform for discussion between stakeholders working on Europass issues and as an associated event to the ePortfolio 2006 international conference that will be held in Oxford, 11th – 13th October. 

The round table is by invitation only and is addressed to people and organisations who have an interest in future developments of Europass, its technological implementation, standardisation and promotion.

Your presence and your contribution to the debates will ensure that your organisation’s viewpoint is heard. We are looking forward to meeting you at the round table, which we hope will provide an excellent opportunity to meet and exchange experiences.

Round table aims

This round table will bring together a range of experts from EU Commission, National Europass Agencies, social partners, guidance services and networks, practitioners, interdisciplinary researchers, standardisation bodies, representatives from the eLearning, eRecruitment and HR industry, Europass CV and users in order to provide them a platform to:

• exchange experiences on the use, as well as the barriers to the use, of online professional profiles and especially the use of Europass CV to support online job searching;

• debate the role of interoperability for the promotion of the large scale adoption of the Europass CV and to improve electronic HR exchanges;

• discuss ways to strengthen operation between actors of education, training and employment in view of standardising the Europass CV.

Background

Since the official launch of the Europass initiative in Luxembourg on January 31st 2005, the EU Commission, CEDEFOP and the National Europass Centres have been working on its promotion and implementation amongst Members States. In doing this, they want to help people make their skills and qualifications clearly and easily understood, facilitate the mobility of both learners and workers, help people find a job, get experience abroad, or enrol in an education or training programme.

At the same time, organisations from the eLearning, eRecruitment and HR industry, including Public Employment Services are also working to implement Internet services to help both learners and workers to build their online CV’s, online professional profiles and/or digital identities in order to facilitate HR electronic exchanges such as the search for work or the online application through a Job Board. Some of them are already using the Europass CV format, even so the majority are using own or proprietary CV formats which make difficult the processing and management of the information for human beings and intelligent agents.

For this reason most of them, as well as the European institutions, are concerned by standardisation and interoperability issues to facilitate the exchange of information with eLearning, Employment and HR services according to a human resource lifelong perspective.

Standardisation bodies such IMS Europe and the HR-XML Consortium are developing and supporting interoperability standards such as IMS LIP/ePortfolio or HR-XML SEP for the exhange of HR data.

Professional non-profit associations such as The European Institute for eLearning and MENON Network EEIG are working on European funded projects to help cross interoperability between systems from education to labour market, to develop, implement and test a coherent, systemic framework for the transparency and interoperability of competences among EU countries, to facilitate the adoption of an interoperable and user-controlled Europass CV, to develop Europass CV applications...

Public and private organisation such as Synergetics, Giunti Labs, Forem, Stuttgart University, Wien University and British Telecom among others are working on European funded projects to support the transition process of Ontology technology from Academia to Industry or to prove that a competency ontology as the common reference model can overcome the current disparate modelling of competencies which does not take interoperability in mind...

Bodies and institutions involved in the development of Open Source projects are also working in this field: the HR-XSL project, Open Source Recruiter, Jerimoth, Open Human Resources, OpenSkills...

There is however no structured and open cooperation between these multiple stakeholders and Europass CV users, no platform to exchange and discuss theirs views or share their achievements...

And despite all these organisational efforts, citizens still face problems in building their online professional profile, describing their own competences and skills, being able to control their personal data and move it from site to site for easy, fast and convenient European-scale comparison and inclusion in public databases, employment sites, such as Job boards, and co-optation sites for effective online job searching.

While the Common Qualification Framework addresses the issue of transparency of qualifications, it has to be accompanied by a proper set of technical standards that will insure the seamless communication across information systems in education, training and employment. There is work to be done at human (Common Qualification Framework) as well as machine levels (Europass, HR-XML and IMS standards) to make people understand each other and machine speak seamlessly to each other. By providing and implementing proper technical standards Europe will be able to increase the accessibility of the job market ...

There is work to be done, but cooperation needs to be strengthen!