EAF Accreditation Framework for the European Career Guidance Practitioners (known in Italy as Checkup Professionale ®) comes from the European Project EAS European Accreditation Scheme for Careers Guidance Counsellors, which I wrote and of which I was Scientific Director (1), so let’s start from EAS.
The proposal for the project EAS was submitted on the 2006 Leonardo da Vinci call to cooperate with IAEVG International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance in developing an international accreditation framework for career guidance practitioners, but when EAS was finally approved in September 2006 IAEVG’s scheme, called EVGP Educational and Vocational Guidance Practitioner was almost done. So we (the Partnership) worked on our own and produced something different. EVGP is a sort of competencies based framework (for an appraisal see Evangelista 2007a). Competencies based frameworks are focused on personal features, that is to say how the person is (Evangelista 2007a). I was not fully satisfied with this approach and thought an approach based on main tasks (how the person carries out the main tasks of his/her job) would have been more precise for accrediting practitioners (Evangelista 2007a).
In February-March 2007 I produced three documents (Evangelista 2007b, 2007c, 2007d) trying to highlight the differences between the two approaches and which main tasks (still called main activities’) could be identified in four existing frameworks.
At this point EAS European Accreditation Scheme was born. In Evangelista 2007d you can find the main features of EAS (and of EAF, my recent development of it):
- The accreditation of the main tasks carried out by people delivering career guidance (instead of occupations as in most other frameworks),
- A mosaic structure of the accreditation: each practitioner can chose to be accredited only on main task(s) he/she carry out usually
- The definition of main task (a main task is defined as ‘The main identifiable and self standing activities career guidance practitioners can accomplish. (…) A task can be listed as a main tasks when/if is A. identifiable, B. self standing C. requires significant distinct knowledge and skills to be carried out, D is prominent (important) (Evangelista 2007d)
- the identification of some of the main tasks accredited in EAS and EAF
- the differentiation of accreditation by main clients groups (mainstream (same culture of the practitioner) students and adults, immigrants, disabled, etc.)
Further refining work was carried out thanks to discussion with project Partners (a partial account of the process is given in Repetto et al. 2007) and to a Pilot carried out in Europe in 2008 with over 100 practitioners and stakeholders of career guidance. After the end of EAS (September 2008) I further refined the framework so launching in October 2008 EAF European Accreditation Framework. The following project IMPROVE Improving Validation of Not-Formal Learning in European Career Guidance Practitioners 510640-LLP-1-2010-1-IT-GRUNDTVIG-GMP (2011-2012) allowed me to standardize the assessment procedure and made EAF better known. Checkup Professionale ® (the Italian name of EAF) is a registered trade mark owned by Leonardo Evangelista.
Notes
1. The Project, called ‘EAS European Accreditation Scheme for Careers Guidance Counsellors’ (IT06CFTH81406), carried out in 2006-2008, was funded in part by the European Commission under the Leonardo da Vinci Programme. Main partners: COREP IT, FORCOOP TO, ICG Institute for Career Guidance UK, Christ Church University UK, UNED ES, KADIS SLO. Several other European organisations, some of them career guidance practitioners associations (including the IAEVG, International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance www.iaevg.org) have supported the initial proposal and/or participated in the pilot – together with more than 100 career guidance practitioners and decision makers of 18 European countries.
Bibliography
- Evangelista L . (2007a) Up patriots to arms! Why and how to structure an European framework for accrediting career guidance practitioners, retrieved on the 3 rd of October 2008 at https://orientamento.it/indice/up-patriots-to-arms
- Evangelista L. (2007b) A comment on WP2 , 27 th of February 2007
- Evangelista L. (2007c) Some hypothesis on the EAS Framework , Madrid, 8 th March 2007
- Evangelista L. (2007d) MTF, A Possible EAS Framework
- Repetto E., Mudarra M.J., Uribarri M., Ferrer P., Velaz de Medrano C., Manzano N. (2007) Work Package 2: Accreditation Scheme. EAS internal document.
Author: Leonardo Evangelista © Leonardo Evangelista. First placed in this website on the 6th of October 2008. Version of the 2 April 2012. This article can be reproduced quoting Author’s name and website www.orientamento.it. More articles by the same Author are available at https://orientamento.it/english/index.htm