Empowering Migrant Skills in Austria: Holistic Accreditation Approach

2. Complex system of accreditation • Austria has a complex education system with a strong occupational/professional orientation • General education streams are rare and prepare to a large extent for university education • The strong labour market orientation of education and training goes hand in hand with a diverse landscape of specialised professional associations which often issue the necessary license to work • Accreditation of competences and skills is therefore decentralised and requires bridging institutions to help find the proper and most efficient ways: specific need

3. Solution: Holistic approach to skills recognition • Formal recognition of skills does not suffice to get a job: • A major reason may be that the labour market does not call for these skills, • that there is an oversupply of these skills; • the communication skills needed to exercise the task may not be sufficient, • discrimination has to be overcome

4. Network of institutions to connect the migrants and their skills with facilitators to promote employment • The focus of the network is on migrants, who have acquired skills abroad and who would like to either find adequate jobs in Vienna, or further their competences. Their tasks are: • 1: to render the skills of migrants visible (with or without accreditation), • 2. to build on their skills and integrate them into an education and training programme which fills in, where certain skills are lacking either as far as the requirements in Austria in the original profession are concerned or for another profession/trade which builds on the acquired skills and competences from abroad. • 3.to certify the adapted, now Austrian, professional skills and help get into a job –recruitment centre/cluster of firms who tend to take graduates from the college.

5. Lessons learned which are transferable to other countries • Advantage of this approach: • centred on the individual, his/her capabilities and skills • while at the same time checking the local labour market needs and thus employment opportunities. • The integration of special teachers, who are able to communicate the specialised language needed in the profession, • as well as flexible education and training in a further education college, All the above are important complements. The general feeling is that this combination of learning and working on the job is a faster means of getting the skills accredited than just going for the formal accreditation of schooling. It is particularly harder to get skills accredited which have been gained abroad from working on the job. The above mix of measures provides a way to overcome that problem by integrating the migrants into a learning programme which adapts to the speed of learning and/or knowledge base of the migrant. At the end of a course of variable length is a certificate which is a trustworthy indicator of the actual capabilities and competences of the holder.