Equal-Works

BOWL - Building Opportunities through Workplace Learning

Skills-Up involves DPs from The UK, The Netherlands and Germany. The transnational partnership had partners in Germany and the Netherlands who shared information on best practice.

The transnational partnership focused its work on all those with low or basic skills needs, such as older workers (e. g. in SME’s), migrant groups, disadvantaged, women and those traditionally excluded from learning.

The key problem is a lack of adequate training provision within the workplace. This is being addressed in a variety of ways - such as through union learning representatives in the Building Opportunities project, and through training SME employees in the Kennislift project, who comment:

"There is little interest within SME’s for training working employees. Together with the fact that almost all government incentives are focused on the unemployed, there are almost no investments in working employees in SME’s. This results in a major discrimination in the levels of training offered between employees in SME and in employees in larger companies."

The EDUC-net project commented that:

"At EDUC-net we are trying to overcome discrimination based on lower qualification and disadvantages due to the fact that people are re-entering the workforce after a break (mothers e. g.). We are doing this by developing new workplace learning/e-learning methods and modules for the media economy.

The other key common interests of the transnational co-operation were to develop, design and test (to pilot) innovative ways to:

• Transfer key qualifications
  
  
• Exchange of experiences and expertise
  
  
• Secure employability
  
  
• Strengthen regional and sectoral development
  
  
• Exchange best practice in the support and provision of workplace learning
  
  
• Explore means of providing better workforce training
  
  
• Develop test and manage new approaches to workplace learning
  
  
• Exchange of innovative learning methods

This involved the exchange of key personnel the development of e-learning methods, the exchange of teaching-/training-material, and the hosting of workshops on the subject matter as well as attending/ speaking at key EU events.