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School is the place where destinies are built. It depends on teachers whether these destinies will be built on the aspirations of the educated ones. One can hear more and more important actors of Romanian public life, but also ordinary citizens expressing their dissatisfaction with the results of the Romanian school. The goal is to have competent graduates, able to respond successfully to the requirements of the profession for which they have been prepared who are able to quickly integrate in the labour market. Before accomplishing these objectives, we must understand that any improvement in the quality of training involves an amount of changes in technical education. From this perspective, this paper presents a study on some training programs for pre-university education in Romania, for the qualifications required by employers in the automobile industry. Based on the research results, the authors propose a number of amendments for vocational training standards and curriculum documents, supposed to meet the expectations of the business environment, to facilitate a better mobility of graduates and to ensure a minimum level of knowledge required for further studies in higher education.

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In recent years, the US has been experiencing a shift in technical and professional education. Industry, education and government stakeholders are redefining their partnerships and working together to create competency-based, industry-driven education at the local, state, and national levels. These form the fundamental principles of a paradigm shift in education needed to combine and enhance innovative educational approaches from different research fields, as well as best-practice models from other countries. This paradigm shift presents a challenge, as education and public sectors are typically not familiar with matured (project) management principles, and often follow the 'Garbage Can-Model' (Cohen, 1964), while, simultaneously, industry experts lack experience and knowledge about the academic and public world. But both have to answer questions like: How can [project management] PM measure progress in an educational project? Which PM methods are most/least helpful?

Using a case study approach to the research, this paper will analyse several highly visible and innovative stakeholder partnerships that are breaking traditional curriculum and assessment models. Using industry subject matter experts, the Michigan Advanced Technician Training (MAT2) program [has] developed a competency-based curriculum that incorporates a sophisticated methodology of assessments using the industry-driven [developing a curriculum] DACUM approach as the foundation. The new model requires a sophisticated methodology for tracking learning analytics including performance, completion rates, and learning gaps. This paper will propose a solution.

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