Lichtenstein (FL), November 2006 - How can quality and transparency in vocational training be improved? This question is central to the EU's efforts to instil more trust, transparency, and mobility within the European workforce.
As a result, a joint program called SAETO - funded by the European Commission under the LEONARDO DA VINCI Community Vocational Training Action program - was established in 2005 and is well under way.
SAETO - the self-assessment program for Educational and training organisations - is developing a quality framework for self-assessment that is focused on the special needs of small educational and training organisations (ETOs) to serve various customer groups such as internal and external trainers, teachers, apprentices, or students.
Moreover, SAETO will be supported with available methods and tools of the Continuous Improvement Process. SAETO's output will be used as an input for an ETO-specific knowledge base of the GOA-WorkBench. GOA-WorkBench is support software for TQM implementations that has been developed as part of the European Research Programme and which is licensed by EFQM, a non-profit membership foundation.
This tool has been used for the current electronic version of "Fit for Excellence" and supports customer satisfaction surveys, thus facilitating self-assessments and feedback of organisations as well as individual courses.
A multimedia tutorial will be developed to facilitate the implementation of the SAETO results by the ETO end users.
At the end of the project, a comprehensive tool for the carrying out of an easily understandable and economically viable self-assessment process will be available. It will meet the requirements of the official quality recognition scheme for ETOs, thus lowering the previously existing implementation barriers substantially.
