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/