Background

City & Guilds is the first organisation to in the UK to launch the Europass Certificate Supplement.

With over 50% of the NVQ market share, City & Guilds felt it was essential that the organisation gave its support to the Europass initiative in order to highlight and strengthen the role of vocational education and training in enabling mobility.

City & Guilds firmly believes the Certificate Supplement will provide an excellent tool which encourages learners to consider study or job opportunities abroad and helps employers choose the best candidate for a position.

City & Guilds has been committed to implementing the Certificate Supplement since Europass was launched in December 2004. However, given the size of its operation, a number of factors had to be considered before approval to proceed could be granted.

Key considerations

1. Timescale

City & Guilds has a portfolio of over 500 qualifications and it would have been a resource intensive exercise to launch the Certificate Supplement for every award at the same time. An additional challenge was that a qualification might lead to more than one specialisation (ie certificate) at the same level. This then requires a Certificate Supplement to be produced for each individual certificate achieved because the Supplement relates not only to the qualification, but also to the route a learner has chosen to complete.

It was therefore decided that the project would be rolled out in three phases:

Phase 1 (Feb 08)

Certificate Supplements were produced for the most popular international qualifications and qualifications that make up the top ten Apprenticeship packages.

Phase 2 (May 08)

Certificate Supplements launched for the majority of existing qualifications.

Due to the time and resource implications, Certificate Supplements are not produced for qualifications which have been or will be withdrawn in the near future and/or are taken up in very small numbers.

Phase 3 (Feb 08 onwards)

All new City & Guilds qualifications are automatically supported by a Certificate Supplement at their launch.

2. Availability and format

As the Certificate Supplement is not a personalised document and only valid with the original certificate, City & Guilds opted to make the Certificate Supplements available in an electronic (pdf) format, free of charge.

A dedicated Europass website has been created where the Certificate Supplements can be downloaded: www.cityandguilds.com/europass. This provides an easy, 24-hour and free access to the documents for all users.

3. Content

The content and the wording of the Certificate Supplement was agreed with the UK National Europass Centre. A template has been drawn up and used as the basis to produce the Certificate Supplements across the Product Development Department.

There are six different teams within City & Guilds developing qualifications, it is therefore essential that the Certificate Supplements are developed using a consistent approach.

4. Length of the document

The aim has been to keep the length of the Certificate Supplement to two or three pages. This was achievable for the majority of the City & Guilds qualifications, although a few of them had such a large or complicated structure that the Certificate Supplement needed to be extended by one or two pages.

5. Cost

One of the reasons for issuing the Certificate Supplements in an electronic format was to keep expenditure to a minimum. The main cost lies in the resources required to produce the Certificate Supplements. However, once the documents are issued, there is no significant running or maintenance cost involved.

6. Language

The Certificate Supplements are currently offered in English. City & Guilds will however consider translation of the Certificate Supplements depending on the demand from learners and employers.

7. PR/promotion

As well as creating its own Europass website (www.cityandguilds.com/europass), City & Guilds produced two press releases: one targeted the corporate sector to raise awareness among employers, while the second was aimed at managers responsible for selection and recruitment.

The Europass initiative is also widely advertised in City & Guilds qualification documentation and promotional materials.

8. Training and monitoring

Internal briefing documents were prepared to provide a single point of reference for Europass related information. In addition, the entire Customer Relations team was trained on Europass to ensure they are able to log and answer customer queries.

Observations

The key to the success of the Europass Certificate Supplement is employer acceptance. Employers need to be aware and recognise the Certificate Supplement in order to turn the document into a meaningful tool.

It would also be beneficial to introduce standardisation at a European level to ensure Certificate Supplements produced by different countries capture similar and easily comparable information.