Resumen de Europe wide Industry Certification Using Standard Procedures based on ISO 17024
Richard Messnarz, Damjan Ekert, Michael Reiner, Miguel Ángel Sicilia Urbán 
ECQA (European Certification and QualificationAssociation) is the result of a series of EU funded projects from2005 – 2012. This included European projects such as EQN(European Quality Network, 2005 – 2007), EU CertificatesCampus (2008 – 2009) and DEUCERT (Dissemination of EUCertification), the ECQA nowadays acts as an organization thatis independent from funding. The members of ECQA are widelyspread all over Europe and vary from universities to companiesas well as individuals.ECQA is aimed at a demographic problem of education andtraining in the European Union. For people at 40 – 50 it is manyyears ago that they attended the university and required skillsnowadays are changing every 2-3 years. This means that theirskills get outdated and we experience in Europe a growingunemployment from the age of 45 upwards. Universities inEurope are currently not addressing this problem.EQN developed a so called role based qualification concept wheree.g. an existing software engineer (who studied informatics some15 years ago) can identify job roles to upgrade so that he remainsa value for the organization. He might receive additional industryqualification for e.g. a safety architect (additionally learning howto enrich existing software architecture with functional safetyaspects). This way the person, would for instance, grow into asafety architect position and a younger person who knows moreabout new programming techniques gets his old position. EQNthen developed certification mechanisms for this role basedapproach for university and industry educational partnerships.EU Cert Campus collected about 15 job roles, structured thecorresponding skills sets and established online services. Theonline services comprise skills browsing, skills assessment, andonline training. So people from industry can attend job rolebased qualification training from the work place.DEUCERT established ambassadors for this new job role basedqualification concept Europe and worldwide. DEUCERT alsohelped to create a critical mass of partners. At the moment we dohave 26 job professions (ready and in progress) that are certifiedall over Europe and already outside of the European Union. Theconcept is meanwhile supported by approx. 60 universities andtraining bodies in Europe.Human resource managers from leading multinationalcompanies called ECQA “a success story” because so far theuniversities in Europe do not address the mentioneddemographic problem and ECQA has already achieved morethan 11000 online trainings and more than 6600 certificates inEuropean industry and at university PhD programs.The processes of the ECQA are mapped onto the ISO 17024international standard for the certification of persons.The PAC project will integrate further skills sets andcertification options into the ECQA platform.
