Work-based Learning – in Industrial Engineering

The development of employees’ skills and competence has become the keydriver of economic growth in the developed world. It is widely recognised that it is only through enhancing people’s skill and competences that future competitive advantage will emerge. Consequently companies need to be able to identify precise areas where they have, orcanbuild,distinctive competences that will enable them to compete effectively.However skill and competence development aimed at especially post-graduate employees is still an area of great potential of progress. Nowadays with the European Qualification Framework (EQF) the tool to accredit such sills and competences is available - even if they (the skills and competences) have been achieve through in-formal or non-formal learning. A partnership of seven industrial engineering institutes from Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have set out to develop and test a model for skills and competence development for employees within a company context. Inspired by the concept of Work-based learning (Boud, 2001) and a facilitating approach to learning (Kolmos et al., 2004)), the partnership will develop a Work-based learning model aiming at industrial engineering – a WBL-IE model, which will be pilot tested in the seven partner countries and the learning out-come will be matched against the EQF. The intention with the research is to bring new knowledge and models to the filed on continuing education primarily within an industrial engineering context The research approach is inspired by action research, which is defined by a participatory process concerned with developing practical knowledge in an attempt of improving e.g. life of human beings (Lewin, 1946; Reason et al., 2003) and a case studies methodology (Flyvbjerg, 2006, 2011) This paper will provide insight into the results of the pilot cases; how the competence need are recognised; how the learning objectives are identified; how the learning program is designed and how the learning out-comes are assessed and matched to the EQF.QC 20160621