In other words, a document synthesising objectively the most basic needs and expectations to be taken into account, both by higher education institutions and by companies during apprenticeships to assure the quality of its outcomes.
The ApprenticeshipQ Quality Criteria was proposed and accepted as a base text for the development of a formal standardization document – a DNP Guide – by Instituto Português da Qualidade (IPQ), the Portuguese National Standardization Body.
The DNP Guide is still under development and is currently open for comments. If you wish to contribute, you can do so here.
February 2020 | NEWS! | Results of the AppQ survey
Many thanks to all participants! We’ve completed our survey about quality criteria for HVET and SMEs.
The developed quality criteria identified in O3-A2 were validated in an online survey, which allowed participants to rank the criteria in order of importance, suggest improvements, reject criteria and/or propose new criteria. The scale ranged between cannot evaluate – totally agree – agree – disagree – totally disagree.
In order to achieve the target 250 responses, the survey was translated into the national languages of the project partners and was open for 12 week. In total 482 participants took part in the survey. Most participants came from Portugal (N=179), followed by Slovenia (N=105) and the Basque Country (N=68). The number of participants from each country is illustrated in the table below:
Five stakeholders were identified in advance as target groups: Auditors and Quality experts, Providers of Higher Education/Higher Vocational Education and Training, Representatives of SMEs, Students, who have already started or completed a work-based learning period, and Alumni.
All stakeholders took part in the survey. As the figure below shows, Providers of Higher Education/Higher Vocational Education and Training were the largest group with 26% or 126 participants. Followed by Auditors and Quality experts (24% or 118 participants) and Students (20% or 94 participants).
All survey participants were invited to submit comments at the end of the survey. These were collected, translated from the respective national language into English and analysed. The comments were discussed among the consortium, whether the suggested changes would be accepted or rejected. Reasons to reject a comment were for example for being out of scope or a country specific.
The results of the survey showed that the participants regard all quality criteria as important. The means ranged between 2.10 and 2.42. Therefore, no ranking could be established. Thus, all 30 quality criteria were included in the final list. Similarly, the means between stakeholders showed little difference.
May 2019 | NEWS! | Survey Launched
Since the beginning of the ApprenticeshipQ project in September 2017, our researchers have been surveying the European PHE/HVET market- both directly and through literature – to characterize the diversity and commonalities of apprenticeship schemes, identify good practices and extract success factors, which fed the development of a set of quality requirements for Apprenticeships.
At this phase, the project is requesting stakeholders to validate the first draft of this set of requirements, which will later be transformed into a requirements standard to manage the quality of apprenticeships.
Therefore, if you belong to one (or more) of the following stakeholder categories, we invite you collaborate with the ApprenticeshipQ Project by responding to our SURVEY.
