Quality apprenticeships: a manual for placement providers

The project “Mainstreaming Procedures for Quality Apprenticeships in Educational Organisations and Enterprises” (ApprenticeshipQ) will support educational institutions and placement providers to offer high-quality education to their apprentices. We consider educational institutions here as Higher Vocational Education and Training Institutions, and Professional Higher Education Institutions as Universities of Applied Sciences and Colleges, as well as Academic/ Research-oriented Universities). The project’s proposed assessment of quality will make these processes more manageable and will benefit all stakeholders. These benefits include lifelong learning for teachers, professors and tutors, enhancements for placement providers, improvement of apprentice’s skills development and overall higher quality of the learning experience. The activities of ApprenticeshipQ will strengthen the cooperation and networking between educational institutions and their training partners’ site (placement providers), by providing them with innovative practices to enhance or establish quality management documented information that was developed and tested during the project. The aim is to develop management tools that support educational institutions and placement providers to offer and direct high-quality apprenticeships. These management tools shall be recognised as a model to improve the quality of the apprenticeships and will serve as a basis for the development of formal international standards and guidelines. This guide is structured as follows: The guide starts by giving an introduction to the ApprenticeshipQ project, containing definitions of the research, which led to this guide. Guidance on how to use this guide follows. This section provides a more detailed description of the present document and its objectives. The quality criteria developed in the project are listed with the corresponding measurement indicators in chapter 5. Each criterion is supplemented by a short description and an example. The examples are taken from their own project qualitative interview survey with numerous placement providers. Also, a link to documented information is provided for each quality criteria. How these criteria can be implemented is explained in Chapter 6 using a PDCA (PlanDo-Check-Act-Cycle) model