Europass

Last updated

Europass is a European Union (Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion) initiative to increase transparency of qualifications and mobility of citizens in Europe. [1] It aims to make a person's skills and qualifications clearly understood throughout Europe (including the European Union, European Economic Area and EU candidate countries).

Contents

The Europass platform offers digital tools and services such as the Europass profile, Curriculum Vitae (CV) builder, Cover Letter editor, Digital skill self assessment tool, the European Digital Credentials for learning, the job and skill trends tool as well as information related learning and working in Europe, Europass Mobility, Certificate Supplement, and Diploma Supplement, sharing a common brand name and logo. [2] Since 2012 individuals have been able to assemble all Europass documents in the European Skills Passport. [3] In July 2020, the new Europass platform was launched where users can register and create their Europass account, a personal and secure online space to record all their skills, qualifications, achievements and experiences. This platform aims to be a lifelong learning and career management tool for its users.

Europass web portal

The Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMPL) developed and maintains the Europass portal in 30 languages. The portal is the reference resource of information related to working and learning in Europe. Europass is a free set of online tools to manage one's skills, and plan their learning and career in Europe.

In every country, a National Europass Centre promotes and provides Europass tools and services.

Europass technical resources

Europass XML schema

Europass has produced an XML vocabulary to describe the information contained in the CV and Language Passport. [4] A Europass CV or Language Passport can be saved in Europass XML format or PDF format with the XML attached. Both formats can be imported into the Europass online editors or any other system that understands the Europass XML, ensuring that all information is properly parsed.

Web services

Europass Web services provide a standard way (web API) for other systems, software, and services to use Europass services in an automated way. An example is the web service which enables the remote generation of Europass documents in PDF, OpenDocument, or Microsoft Word formats, starting from a Europass XML file.

Labels and help texts

Text labels used for the Europass CV and ELP (European Language Passport) are available in various formats from the Europass website:

Weblog plug-in

The Directorate General for Education and Culture has co-financed the European project "KITE" under the Leonardo da Vinci programme. KITE offers an implementation of the Europass-CV as a plug-in for the open-source software weblogs WordPress and Dotclear. The plugin allow users of those blogging services to store a Europass CV in all European official languages and export it into the following formats: PDF, ODT, HTML, XHTML, HR-XML. The plugin is compliant with HR-XML SEP specifications. Last version of the plugin has been released in January 2008.

History

The Europass framework was established by Decision 2241/2004/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 2004 on a single Community framework for the transparency of qualifications and competences (Europass) and entered into force on 1 January 2005 by its own terms.

Related Research Articles

A web service (WS) is either:

IEK is a Greek abbreviation name for the Ινστιτούτο Επαγγελματικής Κατάρτισης.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Education in Greece</span> Overview of education in Greece

Education in Greece is centralized and governed by the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs at all grade levels in elementary and middle school. The Ministry exercises control over public schools, formulates and implements legislation, administers the budget, coordinates national level university entrance examinations, sets up the national curriculum, appoints public school teaching staff, and coordinates other services.

Extensible Application Markup Language is a declarative XML-based language developed by Microsoft for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise.

A user interface markup language is a markup language that renders and describes graphical user interfaces and controls. Many of these markup languages are dialects of XML and are dependent upon a pre-existing scripting language engine, usually a JavaScript engine, for rendering of controls and extra scriptability.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source graphical subsystem originally developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. WPF uses DirectX and attempts to provide a consistent programming model for building applications. It separates the user interface from business logic, and resembles similar XML-oriented object models, such as those implemented in XUL and SVG.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">General Architecture for Text Engineering</span>

General Architecture for Text Engineering or GATE is a Java suite of tools originally developed at the University of Sheffield beginning in 1995 and now used worldwide by a wide community of scientists, companies, teachers and students for many natural language processing tasks, including information extraction in many languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MadCap Software</span>

MadCap Software is an American computer software firm headquartered in San Diego, California that creates help authoring tools and solutions for technical writers and documentation teams. Several principal managers, software engineers, and support personnel were recruited from rival firms, such as Adobe Systems and Macromedia, to found MadCap Software. MadCap's authoring tools are all based on xHTML.

Grammar Explorer is a language learning resource that was co-founded by the European Commission as a part of its Lingua programme within the SOCRATES programme. The grammar is based on the requirements of The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) is a development environment created and currently developed by JBoss and Exadel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ploteus</span>

PLOTEUS is an acronym of Portal on Learning Opportunities Throughout European Space, meant to connote πλωτηρ (ploter) which means "navigator" in ancient Greek. It is a European Union web portal, coordinated by the European's Commission Directorate-General for education and culture, that aims to help citizens find out about education and training opportunities, throughout the countries belonging to the European Union, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Turkey, though the latter did not participate in PLOTEUS at its launch, as it was not a member of the Leonardo da Vinci programme yet. According to France 5, the portal offers an "easy access" to an "excellent source of information" from primary school to postgraduate education. PLOTEUS has been prioritised as a "project of common interest" by the European Commission. The European Parliament and the European Council have confirmed in 2006 their "support for transnational web-based services such as PLOTEUS". The portal is run by the Euroguidance network, financed by the Leonardo da Vinci programme, and is interconnected with EURES, the European Commission's portal on job mobility information. Both PLOTEUS and EURES are considered as examples of "pan-European services". After the launch of PLOTEUS and EURES in 2003, the Bologna process drive to favour student mobility in Europe wa further expressed in 2004 by the launch of the Europass program, which is accessible from the EURES portal, as well as PLOTEUS.

Design for All in the context of information and communications technology (ICT) is the conscious and systematic effort to proactively apply principles, methods and tools to promote universal design in computer-related technologies, including Internet-based technologies, thus avoiding the need for a posteriori adaptations, or specialised design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Area of freedom, security and justice</span> EUs home affairs and justice policies

The area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ) of the European Union (EU) is a policy domain concerning home affairs and migration, justice as well as fundamental rights, developed to address the challenges posed to internal security by collateral effects of the free movement of people and goods in the absence of border controls or customs inspection throughout the Schengen Area, as well as to safeguard adherence to the common European values through ensuring that the fundamental rights of people are respected across the EU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ECOTOOL</span> International project

eCOTOOL was an international project undertaken through the European Union's Lifelong Learning Programme, specifically the Leonardo da Vinci programme. It ran from 1 June 2009 until 30 November 2011, with the primary objective of dealing with initial and continuing vocational education and training (VET) in the European Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ColdBox Platform</span> Web application framework

ColdBox is a free, open-source, conventions-based, modular web application framework intended for building enterprise applications with ColdFusion (CFML) using a Hierarchical MVC approach.

DISCO – European Dictionary of Skills and Competences is a structured vocabulary for the description of skills and competences in different contexts such as labour market, education, and training, and the recognition of qualifications. DISCO provides skills and competences classification that is neither linked to occupations nor to qualifications. Instead it functions as a thesaurus of skills and competences which is based on existing international standards and classifications and thus represents a terminological basis for the description of skills and competences, occupations as well as personal skill profiles and CVs, job vacancies, and job requirements or for describing curricula, courses, Diploma and Certificate Supplements or learning outcomes in general. Available in ten language versions, DISCO is meant to support transnational comparability of competences acquired in an educational or work context throughout Europe.

VET-Bib is a bibliographic database covering European vocational education and training (VET) literature maintained by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop).

OpenVINO toolkit is a free toolkit facilitating the optimization of a deep learning model from a framework and deployment using an inference engine onto Intel hardware. The toolkit has two versions: OpenVINO toolkit, which is supported by open source community and Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit, which is supported by Intel. OpenVINO was developed by Intel. The toolkit is cross-platform and free for use under Apache License version 2.0. The toolkit enables a write-once, deploy-anywhere approach to deep learning deployments on Intel platforms, including CPU, integrated GPU, Intel Movidius VPU, and FPGAs.

References

  1. Decision 2241/2004/EC, Article 1
  2. Decision 2241/2004/EC, Article 2
  3. European Commission (18 December 2013), REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL: Evaluation of the Europass initiative: Second evaluation of the Decision of the European Parliament and the Council on a single Community framework for the transparency of qualifications and competences (Europass)
  4. "Data model - XML Resources". Europass Team. Retrieved 28 September 2018.