Forum on Vocational Excellence 2023

Providing today’s talent with the skills to build a great tomorrow 

All around Europe, we have been working together on societal challenges, skills and vocational excellence for years. It is our bread and butter, and yet there is work to be done. Because tomorrow's issues have become today's challenges. Digitalisation, healthy ageing, climate and energy transition and labour market shortages. All challenges we can no longer ignore and which we can only solve together. An ideal job for Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs), because many hands make light work. And CoVEs have proven themselves in recent years! So it is not surprising the European Commission is investing 400 million euro in CoVEs and many EU member states are investing in similar national schemes! Education and business are equal partners and both benefit from finding solutions to real-life problems: sharing experience is multiplying knowledge. During the Forum on Vocational Excellence 2023, education and training providers, governments and businesses come together to share knowledge, inspire and learn from each other in this exciting European Year of Skills

Outcomes of the Forum

We are looking back at two buzzling days in the Netherlands, with inspiring site visits, conversations, workshops and an interactive talkshow. Browse through the photo album or have another look at some of the videos below.

If you like to get a glimps of the site visits on day 1 and what the participants think of it, watch this aftermovie.

 

You can watch the interactive talk show with European Commissioner Schmit and Minister Dijkgraaf as well. If you like to have a closer look at all the Mentimeter results, provided during the talkshow, you can download them here.

 

For the slides and results of the workshops, please visit the page of the workshop of your choice.

Goal of the Forum

Education and training (VET) providers, employers and governments have a shared responsibility to make sure the skills our workforce acquires are up to date with the latest needs and demands of society. This means curricula need to be revised regularly, both in terms of content and form, and new skills, like green skills, digital skills will be added. Furthermore, social and professional skills to work across boundaries of the own sector, the own country and the own type of profession are paramount to be able to address the complex society challenges. Thirdly, applied research and innovation in VET are incredibly important to share the latest developments with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the skills ecosystems, find proof of concepts for companies and stimulate the green and digital transition in our societies. 

This is a huge challenge, but luckily there are many good examples of how VET providers, the labour market and governments have joined forces through the CoVEs in co-creating solutions that do exactly what is needed: offering good quality education and training, in line with society’s needs, and offering additional services like applied research, innovation of professions and sharing context rich learning environments that are used for initial and continuous education and training alike. During this Forum on Vocational Excellence we will focus on these inspiring examples, bringing together the people involved, so they can share their knowledge, lessons learned and best practices with each other, so no one has to reinvent the wheel!