Europass offers five documents to make the skills and qualifications of the learners clearly and easily understood in Europe. One of them is Europass Mobility. Europass Mobility is an initiative of five European partners from Northern Ireland, France, Malta and Germany dedicated to facilitate the recognition of competences acquired during mobility experiences. It aims to give added value to mobility projects by enhancing quality and transparency through evaluation and validation of intercultural, linguistic and vocational competences. Evaluation of the learning outcomes at the end of the mobility programme became a corner stone for the development of competence recognition, at first with a special focus on the one developed in the vocational area. The project assesses the skills acquired by a learner, in addition to the provision of the description of the learning outcomes that are evaluated. This provides a basis for the subsequent validation and recognition of skills and competences acquired in mobility. The procedure comprises the identification of the professional activities by project partners, creating profiles and modular units of learning outcomes to be used flexibly by the sending and hosting company. The predefined learning outcomes serve as a reference base and are enriched by the nonformal competences and informal skills. The process starts with the selection of the host organization, followed by the signing of a learning agreement and the CEMES test6 and is concluded with Europass. Throughout the apprenticeship process each learner is accompanied by a mentor who supports him/her and later becomes an assessor. The assessment of skills and competences acquired in the company is followed by the test. The combination of the results is documented in a final evaluation document and concluded in Europass.
Europass is very available with 27 different languages on the free online platform. In the end- user survey only 42,1% indicated that they did not know and had never used the Europass Mobility document. Unemployed with low skills and those lacking computer literacy skills were the main disadvantaged groups and hardest to reach. The survey suggested to broaden the Europass Mobility document to also record skills and competences gained through domestic experience. This was seen useful by 76,8% of the endusers (European Commission, 2013).
