International Conference „Never Late to Learn! Promoting Opportunities for Learning in Later Life”

 

 

On 25th of October 2012 the final conference of the GRUNDTVIG Multilateral Network “ENLL – Never Late to Learn” took place in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference was organized by E-NLL GRUNDTVIG Multilateral Network, supported by the European Commission – Lifelong Learning programme, with the participation of 26 organisations from 14 different European countries.

The conference started with an introduction of the E-NLL network. The network aims at inclusion of elderly people in lifelong learning through offering models for learning, mobility and volunteering. The E-NLL network provides a collection of good practices from various European countries, offering various models for senior education activities.



At the conference international project partners presented current challenges in the field of senior education. The experts raised concern about the necessity of establishing meaningful recreational activities and successful strategies to enhance seniors to gain digital competences in later life.

Another focus of the conference was the topic of competence development in senior volunteering, also in the context of intergenerational learning.

The afternoon programme was a discussion panel with Bulgarian volunteers and international experts on the role of various institutions, social partners and other stakeholders for Learning in Later Life and its success factors. The conference was closed with a presentation of good practices and events, organized by the E-NLL network.

die Berater^®, one of the participating organizations of the E-NLL network, was awarded with the grade label  NESTORGOLD, which rewards companies and organisations that implemented a balanced and appropriate age management and at the same time promote their female and male employees according to their potentials, needs and stages of life.

 The objective of the grade label NESTORGOLD is to strengthen the awareness of Austrian companies and organisations about the particular merit of elder employees, and at the same time initiate the organisation of an age appropriate, life phase-oriented and gender-sensitive working environment for all generations.

How to measure informal competences?

What are the personal, social and organisational competences needed to be successful in the service economy and how can these competences be measured? – this question sums up the issues that the LLP project VITA currently works on. With European societies being more and more based on the service economy, professional lives are increasingly determined by the need for continuous learning to adapt to rapidly changing demands and concepts like external (customer) orientation, team work/ cooperation, etc. Especially social competences are necessary for effective management in the service sector and are becoming competitive factors at the job level and as such aspired competences both for employment and societal reasons.

These rather cross-cutting competences are often learnt in informal contexts, be it in extracurricular activities connected with school education, societal learning (active citizenship) or organisational learning in higher education beyond formalised curricula. Thus the mentioned competences are being developed in a sphere that overlaps all educational sectors: schools, higher education, VET and adult education.

As far as the validation of these competences is concerned an "off the shelf"-assessment against standardised systems (e.g. entirely developed on basis of EQF, ECVET and ECTS) is barely conceivable because in most of the cases they are not suitable to display non-cognitive learning outcomes that determine service orientation, such as interaction, tolerance, commitment, motivation etc.

VITA intends to link formal validation approaches based on EQF with evidence of social and personal competence development which are essential in the service sector.
The project is currently seeking for experts from informal/non-formal pioneer projects in any learning domain to inquire them about innovative approaches and projects to validate service-related competences. In order to make this inquiry process as efficient as possible, we have created an online questionnaire which can conveniently be filled in online and can be found here:
http://dieberater.vitasurvey.sgizmo.com/s3/