Securing quality in TVET - a compendium of 'best practices': fourteen main principles for the improvement of technical and vocational education and training

Worldwide high-tech work-processes require well trained individuals and industrial nations compete in designing concepts of training which can match the challenges of successful performance at the place of work. For the basic design of these concepts we need a symbiosis of assessment-oriented and experience-oriented training as the presently two leading models of training worldwide. Or in other words: we need to employ 'intelligent standards' as reliable benchmarks and we need to involve practical experience in training as the target level for acquiring the competences required today. Beyond this basic design [the authors] have attempted to cast the requirements which can safeguard the development of quality training programmes into 14 'main principles'. These principles range from defining a clear mission for each training institution to emphasizing the importance of the concept of the 'skilled worker' and from alternating in training between theory in the classroom and practical training in the workshop to the establishment of paramount standards as reference for the kind of training provided as well as for a reliable orientation regarding the needs of the employers. This structure renders sufficient orientation marks for the design of quality training, yet at the same time it allows for maintaining the flexibility which is needed for responding to different cultural, individual, economic and historical requirements.

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