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Geert BerghuisSkills@school improves vocational training

1Skills@school2Exchange platform is an initiative of the Technical Installation Branch

3Theory Work situation

This initiative shows how much the branch wants to improve practical training. At school, students acquire basic skills. In an internship, they experience success and failure, and they really develop their competences. 4

But companies are not schools. The primary goal of a firm, as you know, is producing goods or services and mentoring comes second. Fine-tuning the learning needs of the students to the practical work is often a problem.5Two problems that affect the quality of vocational training1 Communication in 30% of the internships is insufficient.2 Companies/mentors find it difficult to assess students progress.

How to solve these problems??

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How Skills@school can improve the communication between student, school and company

Mentor Teacher

Student7Problem 1: communication during internships

Mentor: What does the school want?Companies dont know exactly what the school demands of the students and what they are already capable of doing.

8Problem 1: communication during internships

Teacher: How is the student performing in practice? Schools dont get enough information about apprentices performances in the company. The lack of information hinders the coaching of the student. So improving communication is important.

9Exchange PlatformSolution 1: make information available when the users need thisSchoolsMonitoring systemSkills@schoolExchange platformCompanySchoolStudentIt should really help when the information about students progress is available whenever either the schools or the companies need this. Therefore we have made a digital exchange platform. First we have connected the schools monitoring system to this platform.

10Exchange PlatformSchoolsMonitoring systemSkills@school

Exchange

platform

CompanySchoolStudentCompaniesAssessment systemSecond we developed an assessment tool for mentors to record how the student is performing in practice.

11Student results and attendance at school can be monitored by the companies

School results student Attendance We can now have a look at the platform, where school performance and attendance results can be viewed by the companies when they want to. This is the result of the connection with the schools monitoring system.

12 Click on school results and the company finds

Subjects at schoolEnglishReading technical drawings76MarkYou can click on and see more detailed information about the students subjects (on the slide at the left) and marks (at the right) at school. 13

Problem 2: Mentors problems of assessing students progress

The assessment problem is about the mentors evaluating/judging the performance of the interns. The second problem can be divided up into two issues. 14

1 Report models for the companiesare too complicated or too simple.

2Companies have to fill in differentreports.

The first issue concerns the reports which have been used. They are either too complicated or too simple. The second issue is that schools use different report models.

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Solution 2: A simple list to assess students skills in practice reportmodel

Professional skillsKnowledge of materials and toolsConnect cablesTo deal with both issues a simple tool is developed to assess the interns progress. Here you can see the list with professional skills the students have to acquire to become a fitter.

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reportmodel

Marks:Above, on, or under the markAt the right you see the marks the mentors can give: above the mark, on the mark and under the mark. As simple as that.

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Solution 2: A simple list to assess students attitude in practice reportmodel

Marks:Above, on, or under the markAttitudeCo-operationand communicationConfers with customers and contractorsThe same concept is used for the assessment of the attitudes, the soft skills. The list of the professional skills and attitudes has been drawn up in co-operation with both the firms and the schools. And is acceptable for all parties.How the users of the Skills@school platform evaluate the tool?

18Evaluation of the exchange platform

Mentor: Its easy to assess students performance and record the information in Skills@school. Teacher: All information is at hand and its easier to manage the students progress. Student: I have an overview of all my results in one system.

Which factors make Skills@school work?onbetween student, mentor and teacher1 Availability of information whenever it isneeded.

2 User-friendliness with

3 Rating lists which are understandable for students, schools and companies.

20OTIB developedOverall we can conclude that OTIB by developing the Skills@school platform improved the quality of vocational training by making monitoring easier and therefore more attractive.

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Geert Berghuisinfo@geertberghuis.nl

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