How can counsellors use Europass?

Europass consists of five separate documents which are meant to help their holders to move between countries, utilising everything they have learned in one country when studying or working in another. Europass can be also useful for people who are looking for different work or studies within their own countries or want to advance their career.

Counsellors have the role of helping their clients in the transition from school to work or one school stage into another. In some cases the clients neither know where they want to head nor what are their strong or weak sides.

The Europass CV can assist them with the latter because it does not only focus on formal qualifications and work experience but also allows space for non formal or informal aspects as social competences, organisational skills and artistic talent. For a young person who has not yet started a formal career, these fields can be used to point out skills which have been developed either in or outside school.

Self-assessment is the key

CV and the language passport give people the option of describing how well they can master a language. Both are built up on a standard self-assessment frame which consists of a six levels grid to assess listening, reading, spoken interaction (communication), spoken production (e.g. giving a formal lecture) and writing. Each level is carefully explained and the user can therefore easily choose between the possibilities.

When introducing the CV in Iceland, I have discovered that for young people this can give a completely new dimension to language learning and they often discover that their knowledge of a certain language is much better than they thought. In some primary schools, language teachers are using the language passport as a motivation for their students in learning a language.

The self-assessment frame is printed out with both the CV and the language passport and possible employers can therefore easily see to which categories their job applicants are referring when writing their CVs.

Easy to create language versions

One features of the CV the Icelandic students found very useful, is how easy it is to translate it from one language to another. An Icelandic CV can be fetched into an English frame and then all the explanations and the self-assessment frame for languages have been translated. All the user has to do, is to translate the information in each rubric.



For further information on Europass in 26 languages: http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu

Dóra Stefánsdóttir, Euroguidance and Europass Centres, Iceland.