Overview and aims 

Visible Skills of Adults (VISKA) was an Erasmus+ Key Action 3 Project, filed under the call priority theme of "Employment and Skills: validation of informal and non-formal learning in Education and Training." It was a three-year project, running from March 2017 to February 2020 and was coordinated by Skills Norway. The research and evaluation partner of the VISKA project was Cork Institute of Technology.

With this project, the seven partners in four countries address the European policy priority of diminishing skills mismatch by making knowledge, skills and competences of adults more visible through validation of informal and non-formal learning. In particular, VISKA addressed the need to make the skills of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and low-skilled adults more visible, in order to shorten their time to employment, targeted education and training offers and active engagement in society. Along with unemployed in general, these target groups are currently at a disadvantage in European societies and could greatly benefit from improved access to validation services and from more holistic validation arrangements.

The VISKA project implemented and evaluated five interventions, agreed by the partners, and applied to the current processes (in the respective national contexts) for the validation of prior learning. The interventions were developed and agreed with a view to making the knowledge, skills and competence of migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and adults with low skills levels, more visible. While there will be differences across the participating countries in relation to validation policies, practices, and infrastructures; the focus of the project team was to learn how the chosen interventions, when enacted, could bring about real change, for individuals and systems and to collate the learning from the project to contribute to a broader policy agenda.

Planned Interventions for VISKA

• Intervention 1: Regional and National Networks
• Intervention 2: Extending and adapting tools
• Intervention 3: Transversal Skills
• Intervention 4: Training & Capacity Building
• Intervention 5: Access & Awareness

Project results