This website is for information about and discussions on issues of relevance to Aerovet, a pilot project funded under the European Leonardo programme.

AEROVET is a European comparative project funded under the Leonardo programme, which looks at how aircraft maintenance technician training is carried out in France, Germany, Spain and the UK and the scope for trainees to take some modules in another country and receive appropriate credit (and whether in future this could be facilitated under the auspices of ECVET).

Background: these four countries were involved in a previous project (AERONET) which involved the development of holistic Typical Professional Tasks (TPTs) for use in initial training in Airbus. The idea was that mastery of the TPTs would give a basis of developing expertise (and be a more reliable indicator than achievement of learning outcomes (LOs), because of the level of aggregation of the tasks), but it is possible to move from TPTs to LOs in order to construct modules, assign credit etc.  (AEROVET team includes organisations concerned with assessment in England and Wales (QCDA), France (CEREQ) and Germany (BIBB)).

The work packages are as follows:

WP1: workshop with representatives of industry in order to validate that the TPTs are relevant to what aircraft maintenance workers actually do. It is possible to add to or remove tasks from the current list of TPTs.

WP2: TPTs have to be expressed in terms of skills, knowledge, understanding and competences which are already implied in the descriptions of the TPTs. This work will be undertaken by ITB, University of Bremen together with BIBB and CEREQ. The result will be that the TPTs are expressed in terms of (potentially Europe-wide) units – that is, the TPTs are turned into a form acceptable to accreditation bodies and potentially of use within ECVET.

WP3: each national team compares the units with the national regulations in order to see whether there are any possible additions to be made to the units or whether there are any divergences. Each national team will calculate the relative weight of (each unit) of the national qualification and then ascribe notional credit points. This process will allow a comparison to be made between the ratings given between countries and it could also be linked to progression to higher level qualifications. The intention will then be to develop some (European) core profiles / common units.
 
WP4: technical development of European sub-units etc. with the aim to allow progression to HE
 
WP5: sub-units are compared to ECTS scheme (process of validation)
 
WP6: interchange of apprentices across countries (easier because of common units) and evaluation of outcomes (some tests odf apprentice decision-making)
 
WP7: examination of solutions offered by apprentices in tests (extent to which they are able to engage in independent problem-solving) and judgements about the the application of the whole approach to ECVET 

Background on previous AEROnet project

AEROnet was an EU Leonardo pilot-project and had the aim to carry out accompanying work into a possible trend of universalisation of qualification requirements due to the accelerating harmonisation of technical and organisational processes in Europe. Raw material, technologies and processes are not only available in broad regions anymore. In fact globalisation - the demand of global markets - has led to a worldwide move to similar ways of organising work and processes at least in certain sectors of industry. This has had an impact on the qualifications required of employees. This in turn means Vocational Education and Training has to adapt to these production-induced tendencies that can be summed up under the headline "internationalisation of technical and economic processes."

Work processes and the use of material change faster and faster in their evolution. Therefore job profiles change more rapidly too and the requirements for workers are not anymore just of a purely technical nature - soft skills and key qualifications are needed to ensure employees have the ability to adapt these changing processes and industrial needs. This also implies evolving ideas and concepts about training and new ways and tools that involve HR development orientated approach to working processes and holistic skills and competencies.

These circumstances are observable to a considerable extent in the aerospace sector. The requirements for high-tech professions are changing more rapidly than in any other sector. This implies also for the aerospace industry introduction of more identical production processes, especially inside the European market where the production of civil airplanes is almost exclusively in the hands of one company: EADS / Airbus. At the moment, however, production processes are split up whereby single major production steps (wings, undercarriage etc.), or even similar production phases, take place in different countries. Training too is devolved and the training of young workers – even if qualified for the same work – takes place according to different training systems under diverse national authorities and legislations. In consequence they are trained in different patterns for similar, if not the same, work.

For the AEROnet project this presented a challenge. Researchers, teachers of vocational schools and managers of EADS wanted to document the existing diversity, the common contents and methods of training and want(ed) to define a core of vocational training in France, Germany, Spain and the UK, where there are major Airbus plants.

The project ran until the end of 2007. On this site you will find documents, findings and further information about the project and the training practice in EADS / Airbus plants in the four countries.