Lifelong Learning Focus

Context

Lifelong learning (“LLL”) is now a well established term. Commitment to learning and the compe­tence to organize one’s own learning process are key and strongly emphasized by the European Commission, UNESCO and national educational institutions. However, the process is still comparably young. Legislative and administrative structures to support it are just emerging.

Germany addressed LLL-issues for IT professions at the end of the nineties marked by unprecedented growth of the IT industry and lack of quality standards for skills and qualification. Confronted with a huge demand for well trained IT workers, the necessity to qualify at the workplace and the limitations of regulated training and education structures in the context of LLL, stakeholders responded to the call. Simultaneously, the basic orientation towards action competence and business processes that have so much informed the reform of initial vocational training was to be extended to higher levels of qualification.