EPALE study visit to Iceland - Interview with Svein Adalsteinsson from ETSC

Education and Training Service Centre - Reykjavik

“It doesn’t matter where you learn, or when or how, as long as you can show your skills” A group of Belgian (Flemish) stakeholders travelled to Iceland to learn more about Validation of Prior Learning (VPL). Thanks to the efforts of the National Support Services of EPALE and Euroguidance in Iceland the participants of the study visit had an interesting programme for the 3 days of their study visit.

You can read all about the visit and what they learned on EPALE. The group also visited the Education and Training Service Centre in Reykjavik. Here they spoke with director Sveinn Adalsteinsson.

The Education and Training Service Centre (ETSC)) is owned by the Icelandic Confederation of Labour (ASÍ), the Confederation of Icelandic Employers (SA), the Federation of State and Municipal Employees (BSRB), the Ministry of Finance and the Association of Local Authorities in Iceland. Its mission is to increase productivity and competitiveness of Icelandic companies and to increase and visualize/certify the competences of the members of their target group, low-educated adults.

The ETSC has a service contract with The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and administrates the Education and Training fund for adult education.

ETSC’s main responsibility is to make curricula for the target group, develop recognition systems of non-formal and informal learning, increase quality in adult education and develop the system for counselling and guidance services.

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Director Sveinn Adalsteinsson: The ETSC was founded in 2003 out of a need, because it was alarming that 35% of the Icelandic workforce only had primary or lower secondary education (which normally ends in Iceland at around the age of 16). Nowhere else in western Europe these levels were found. We wanted to compare ourselves with the rest of western Europe, so something had to be done, and we have been successful in doing so. In 2016 the ratio of low-educated adults was about 22% of the adult workforce, in 2017 it went below 20%. But now we are back to 22%.

EPALE: What can be reason for this recent increase?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: Perhaps one of the explanations is that we have a lot of migrant workers following the boom in tourism in 2011 after the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull and thanks to Facebook, Instagram and other social media where people were posting their pictures. We had about half a million of tourists back in 2011.

Last year we had about 2,3 million tourists. So there has been an increase in tourism of 20-30% every year.

That’s crazy. Nobody can handle that.

We do our best, but of course there are issues that need to be sorted out.

But above all we needed work force, so there has been a growing number of migrant workers coming in mainly from Eastern Europa, Poland especially, the Baltic countries, Rumania et cetera.

This increase in tourism also caused a boom in construction. We needed to build hotels, restaurants, et cetera.

Most of the small flats in town are now occupied by AirBnB. For this reason the prices of houses and apartments have gone up. All of this changed the economy and our lives. We came from a major economic and financial crisis back in 2008. At that time we saw unemployment rates of up to 15%, a

situation we hadn’t experienced since the 1930’ies. Now unemployment is around 3,5%. That’s also part of the explanation why we have such a high number of people with only primary or lower secondary education because it has always been easy to get a job. If you are tired of school you just get a job and by the end of your working age you have a higher accumulated income than those who have gone to university and who have to pay study loans et cetera. But of course with all these changes in the economy and jobs we need to educate our people more to be better prepared. And especially the low-educated group is most vulnerable for changes in the economy. They are the first ones to loose their jobs when things turn bad. It’s also a question of quality of life, of participation in society, civil participation... which we hope to increase with better education.

This is not always the fact, but at least the chances are higher.

EPALE: How did Iceland cope with this new reality?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: The social partners came to an agreement back in 2003 and they first established our company and then negotiated with the government to give us support.

So the social partners are the owners of our (private) company. It’s not a government institute, but we do have a service contract with the government.

We do the centralized coordination of the implementation of lifelong learning for people without upper secondary education with the 14 lifelong learning centres in our country. In theory this starts for people from 16 years, but in reality it is mainly for people between 25 and 64. We also handle the quality assurance of the lifelong learning centres and we administer the financing. We take care of the statistics and develop tools for the lifelong learning centres. We also train the trainers.

EPALE: Is the service contract with the government an everlasting one?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: No, it is negotiated every 5 years. There is no guarantee that we get the contract,

The Belgian delegation visiting Iceland to learn more about the educational system and validation of prior learnng. From left to right Monique De Ridder (pedagogical support service), Nathalie Druine (ministry of education), Inès Neefs (VISKA project), Ariane Rober (ministry of work) and Sveinn Adalsteinsson (ETSC).

it depends on our results. That’s why most of our staff members have a contract that can be terminated within 6 months notice. We are evaluated every fifth year and we turn in an annual report in which we tell what we have done in the previous year.

Of course we have to do what the government asks us to do, but the social partners are in charge and they determine our company strategy. In exchange the government supports us with one million euro per year for the operation of ETSC. The financing for implementing the measures in the life-long learning centers comes from a special educational fund in which the government puts money. It is managed by a special board with representatives from the Ministry of Education, employers, the unions, local governments, and the Ministry of Finance

“We have a contract with the 14 lifelong learning centres in Iceland that are certified”

in the role of being an employer. The Ministry of Education chairs the fund. It is called the Educational fund, and the board makes the decision to deliver the money to the lifelong learning centres.

The centers have to apply every year, and sometimes even twice a year.

If they say, for example, they need money for 60 courses, and they only do 40, they have to give the money back. Same thing if they apply for 1.000 interviews in guidance, and they do less. If they do more, they can apply in the middle of the year and say they need more money. And if the fund has money left, they will be granted it. But it’s the board who decides, ETSC only administers the financing.

EPALE: How is your relationship with the lifelong learning centres?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: We have a contract with 14 lifelong learning centres that are certified through the quality assurance system. They are non-profit non-governmental organisations and in the rural areas they are usually owned by a mixture of local secondary schools, the municipalities, local employer organisations and local unions. Very often they work together with secondary schools, but adults can go where they choose. It depends on which courses are given, or the time when they are given, or just their preference.

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EPALE: Why would someone prefer to go to a lifelong learning centre?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: For example if someone had a bad experience in their secondary school, they might perhaps rather choose to go to a lifelong learning centre. There was an example of a lifelong learning centre in the north of Iceland that offered courses in English, but nobody turned up. When they changed the location of the courses, all of a sudden the courses were full. Sometimes even only the smell inside of a school building brings back bad memories… In Reykjavik most of the secondary schools don’t accept pupils over 18, because they have enough pupils, but in the countryside the interest is not that high and that’s why they accept older people. But usually when you are, for example, 40 years old, you don’t want to be in the same class as all those youngsters.

Sometimes also the price can be an argument. Some private schools, who also get some support from the government, in some cases ask (more) money for their courses. The courses for the targets groups are usually subsidized by the Educational fund, but there could be a small registration fee to pay, similar to the formal school system.

“Education gives you the basics, but working makes you a professional” Chemical Industry Federation of Finland

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ESTC has a staff of 17 people. Sveinn, Fjola, Björn are also part of the VISKA project team, an Erasmus+ KA3 project in which Belgium also is a partner. VISKA stands for Visible Skills of Adults. And it also means ‘wisdom’ in Icelandic.

Changed focus in education

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: Nowadays there is a changed focus in education (see the slide). To some extent we still have the system in the first column, but more and more we move towards the competence/skills building. What someone has to know or be able to do after the education is still defined by the Ministry of Education in the central curricula, but it is translated into ‘knowledge, skills, competence’ criteria. ETSC translates the curricula for the target groups without upper secondary education. The schools are also allowed to do it, but very few do that. We now have well over 40 tailor-made curricula, only about 5 of them are based on the curricula made by the formal school system. The rest is made from scratch and directed towards vocational skills. For us it doesn’t matter where you learn, or when or how you learn. For us it’s important that we can assist you to demonstrate your skills. After your experience in the working place, after the informal school system, after whatever… It doesn’t matter as long as you have the right skills and can show it. From the Chemical Industry Federation of Finland I particularly like their slogan: ‘Education gives the basics, but working makes you a professional’. Only 20-25% of the things you need to know or to do for your work, you learn at school. The rest is in the working place. And with the fourth industrial revolution, this will become even more true. How can you prepare people for a job of which you don’t even know the name of now?

profiles. Of course we adapt them to Icelandic reality because North American workplaces are different from European. We have different values, different procedures...

EPALE: Which process do you use when you are building a job profile?

“This is the procedure we try to implement, but only about 25% of our programmes are made this way, the other 75% are made the ‘old-fashioned’ way. But we are getting there.”

EPALE: Can you tell us something more about how you work?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: We try to start with a competence analysis of the competences that are needed for a job and then we develop competence standards.

We use these competence standards to make curricula and it’s also the platform for validation. To be able to implement these curricula we need counselling which is free of charge. All of this is financed by the educational fund.

EPALE: How do you do this competence analysis and development of standards?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: We use competency profiling to create standards for learning programs (curricula) and validation of prior learning (tools) – especially where we don’t have any existing curricula e.g. undocumented jobs like ‘sound technician’ or ‘fast food service’. For these jobs we took the competency criteria from the Human Resource Systems Group in Canada which has a database of competency criteria. They have more than 300 general and technical competencies for a range of industries and descriptions extending over 5 levels of what they call ‘proficiency’, more or less equal to our ‘levels’ in the European Qualification Framework (EQF). They also have job

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: We make a steering group with people from the sector. Let’s say if we are analysing housekeeping in hotels, we invite people from hotels for the steering group. They invite middle managers and people who are actually doing the housekeeping. So we get a group of 15 to 20 people that actually do the job and do the discussion. In the first meeting we try to get to a definition of the job. The second meeting is about competency profiling and then we compare the competency profiling with the definition of the job.

This takes 3 meetings and each meeting is about 3 hours long. Of course there is also a lot of work done in between the meetings. So we say it takes about 3 weeks to do this work apart from the time that is spent on the meetings. The result is a job profile that the steering group will adopt. The next step is to build a learning program and validation checklists based on this job profile.

That work is done by us at ETSC or our partners at the lifelong learning centers.

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To try to find out the competencies we work with old-fashioned physical paper notes where we define e.g. self-esteem or self-confidence, initiative, flexibility and more. It is very much about soft skills. But during the meeting we try to take out some of the hard skills as well to put in the validation lists, because people understand those better. It’s not so easy to evaluate yourself e.g. on ‘adaptability’. That’s why we try to quantify everything and put it on the right levels. We don’t support the statement as: ‘He/she has to be good in Excel’. What is ‘being good’? You have to define it better. We believe that every soft skill can be measured, can be put on a level, and can be trained.

EPALE: You also use a tool called ‘Validation against General Employability’.

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: Yes, this tool ‘Validation against General Employability’ is great. It’s to measure work readiness, especially for longterm unemployed. Now, although we only have 3% unemployment, many of them are sometimes very hard to get to work. Basically, something else is a problem, it’s not just the lack of a job.

Very often it’s a lack of self-confidence.

There are all kinds of problems that can keep someone from working. That’s why all kind of institutes should be involved in the process of trying to guide them to employment. The tool ‘Validation against General Employability’ has been very effective for this kind of unemployed people. In one group we had about 40 long-term unemployed people.

They did this validation against general employability and as a result they started to look at their strong sides, not only at their weak sides anymore.

They did have strong sides, but they didn’t realize that. After this process 30 of them found a job or went back to school. So the Directorate of Labour was very pleased because they pay for this kind of validation since these long-term unemployed people are not necessarily part of our target group.

We have this validation against general employability now up to level 7 on the EQF. And we think it can be used for people who will have to be changing jobs, because of automatization for

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To try to find out the competencies we work with old-fashioned physical paper notes.

example. We can prepare people for increased automatization, for dealing with increased uncertainty about what jobs are about. If you are validated on a high level of general employability you will get the hard skills training in the work place, that’s no problem.

Employers ask us to map people with high levels of soft skills, and then they will take care of the rest. We are confident that soft skills can be trained or measured, because we have seen it.

EPALE: Can you tell us a bit more on the value of defining proficiency levels?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: Defining proficiency levels is very helpful to determine the NQF level of the curriculum. The role and contribution from the participants in the process is clear.

The competencies are helpful in the analysis process. It provides a common ‘language’. They never ask: “What do

you mean by level 2 of being result minded or service minded?” It is an objective description of soft skills, and this helps very much. If you don’t have these descriptions it is easy to get lost in the discussion. The outcomes are also entirely based on the view of those who are involved in the job (labour market) and not produced by ‘curriculum experts’ except experts in that particular job. And people are able to do it, no problem.

EPALE: After you have a job profile, what happens next?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: Ok, so we then have a job profile and we know which soft skills we are talking about to put them in a learning program. Then we make a program description that tells how courses can be designed to help the trainers put together a course. E.g. a suggestion can be that you put ‘quality and safety’ together in a course. This program description can be different

From job profile to learning program to program description.

Individuals finishing course programs, by gender 2014-2018

“In 2018 there were 2.379 participants in courses offered by the lifelong learning centres. The Icelandic labour market is only about 200.000 people.

And the target group is about 37.000 out of these 200.000.

between different learning providers, depending on their target group and their situation. But the learning program is independent from situations, it’s the general framework. The learning programmes are a one-to-one relation to the job profile competences. And everything is measured against the curricula how you are able to demonstrate e.g. quality and safety.

So, to sum it up: the competencies in the libraries are our building blocks.

We are building Icelandic job profiles, based on the competencies with active participation from the labour market. We use the job profiles as a criteria for learning programs and for validation of prior learning. And we are responding to external requirements and to the diversity in the work of the lifelong learning centres.

“We believe that every soft skill can be measured, put on a level, and be trained”

So there is a participation rate of about 6%. But remember that this is the group hardest to convince that they need education. As usual women have higher participation rates then men, partly because there are many courses about taking care of elderly or kids, patients et cetera, and in those professions traditionally women are more represented.

These professions are also usually governed by the government and local governments and the public sector is more willing to give people more spare time to take a course during working hours so people can attend.”

Validation of prior learning

“Last year there were 577 low-qualified people going through the validation process which can be added to the about 3.000 people who attended a lifelong learning course. They are without formal qualifications, that’s why they are counted in our target group. Usually they go to the formal school system after validation. Validation here is aimed at getting work experience translated to credits. Participation of people in the certified trade sector has traditionally always been high: carpenters, plumbers, electricians, a captain on a ship… But during the last year the health care profiles are growing. Last year (2018) they were significantly higher than the certified trades. For the yellow ones there aren’t curricula; they are tested for general employability.”

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EPALE: The centres of lifelong learning also do a lot of counselling?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: The amount of counselling interviews was almost 9.500 last year (2018). Many of those interviews are held in combination with validation. Counselling is an integral part of validation. You would need at least one, maybe even 3 interviews to be able to complete your validation because we really want to find out what someone’s skills are before they go to an assessment. But counselling can also be taken by a person as such, without the aim of having his or her skills validated, for example career counselling.

Behind about those 9.500 interviews there are about 3.000 to 4.000 people involved.

To sum it op: With the 3 measures courses, validation and counselling - we have about 6.500 people in our target group that are using some of our solutions. That is about 18% of our target group.

EPALE: How do the centres try to reach their participants?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: The mission of the ETSC is to increase productivity and competitiveness of Icelandic companies and to increase and visualize/certify the competences of the members of our target group. But then it’s always the question of how to reach them.

As an example: two years ago we got money from the Ministry of Industries, the industrial department, not the Ministry of Education because tourists were complaining about the quality of the services they were getting. 41% of the tourists visiting Iceland said that improvements were needed. They complained that they were paying a 4-starprice for a 2-star-service. This had to be addressed. Our mission was to sell the company managers the idea that with educating their people in the work place they would increase their service level and the income of the company.

This is a model we borrowed from New Zealand and which we adapted to our situation. The idea is that when you invest in your staff, you should get this investment back many times. If you

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increase staff skills you increase the resources of the company, customer satisfaction, service value and the company revenues. And hopefully all

this will be reflected in wages and career development for the staff. We used similar arguments to reach the managers. But usually when a company

is confronted with decreasing customer satisfaction, service value en company revenues they turn to a course provider for training. Very often this doesn’t work, because there is no proper needs analysis made.

What we promote to do is training need analysis, tailormade for each company or a group of similar companies. It can be focus groups. These are expensive, but with very good results. It can also be a survey, or when it’s a very small company it can also be a meeting where you discuss together with the employer and the employees what is needed in the company. After this a training plan is made, based on this need analysis.

And what we also advocate for is the evaluation of company performance before we start the training program, it’s a kind of benchmarking. What are the revenues, what is customer satisfaction, how high is the staff turnover?

After this the training provider provides courses which can be iterated by internal training or online training, but it has to be led by the training provider.

Then after the training an evaluation of company performance is recommended to find out whether the problem is solved, not only an evaluation of how good or how bad the course was. If not, the approach should be changed, until the results are good.

EPALE: Is this approach especially effective in tourism?

Sveinn Adalsteinsson: We think this approach can probably be used for SMEs in all sectors – but a specific ‘language’ must be used for each sector and we need knowledgeable ‘sellers’.

We think pro-active marketing works.

We approach the companies ourselves and ask them whether everything is OK in their company. We don’t wait until the

phone rings. We have an alliance with skills centres and training providers.

During 2018, we visited around 120 small companies. More than 40 contracts were signed, 2.100 employees were involved and 5 training providers active, nation-wide (now expanded to 8). Usually this approach is well-met by the companies although we experienced that working with performance indicators (measurements) is not always easy, because people are not used to it. Training providers have always been focused on individuals. We try to move that onto company-based education.

Training the Training providers takes more time than anticipated because we have to teach them a new kind of language and a new kind of approach.

We say to them: “Don‘t sell courses – sell performance and profitability (ROI).”

EPALE: Thanks very much for the interview and good luck in your work!

The Belgian group travelled to Iceland to learn more about the educational system and Validation of Prior Learning (VPL). First thing they learned was to say ‘Hello’ in Icelandic. This is ‘Godan daginn’ and sounds like ‘Go on dying’! You can read more about the visit on EPALE. THE VISIT

OUR HOSTS at Ranis, EPALE en Euroguidance Iceland

Day 1 Visit to Rannís Visit to the Education and Training Service Centre Visit to Mímir símenntun Day 2 Visit to IDAN Educational Centre.

Visit to the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture Visit to Directorate of Labour Day 3 Visit to the Lifelong Learning Centre in Reykjanes THE VISITORS Nathalie Druine from the Department of Education and Training in Flanders. She is responsible for the implementation of VPL in Flanders.

Ariane Rober from the Department of Work and a member of the Flemish Upskilling Pathways steering group.

Monique De Ridder, pedagogical advisor and a member of the Upskilling Pathways steering group.

Inés Neefs from the Department of Education and Training and involved in the Erasmus+ VISKA project (Visible Skills of Adults) Karine Nicolay, EPALE coordinator in Flanders.

Erasmus+

Visit supported by Epale

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