Apprenticeships at the Professional Higher Education (PHE) level provide students with opportunities to build up new skills and knowledge both on and off the job, while providing companies a reliable way to evaluate and shape potential future hires, while at the same time benefiting from new perspectives which can only be offered by students straight out of education.

However, despite their clear advantages, apprenticeship systems are extremely challenging to manage, as the learning needs of students and the needs of specific enterprises are extremely difficult to match, particularly when organizations need to deal with massive amounts of students and, consequently, data. It is clear that robust and structured communication channels with both enterprises and students, defined management systems and clear evaluation protocols are necessary to manage such a complex process, but the lack of European guidelines and tools to support it seems to be preventing many of the actors in the sector to launch valuable, steady and sustainable Apprenticeship Programmes.

The  Apprentice Track project focuses on:

– How best to organise and monitor student placements in the world of work, to ensure maximum benefit of dual-education experiences to support transparent quality and relevance of students’ knowledge and skills and better use of ICT.

– How to ensure comparability and transparency of apprenticeships system data to strengthening cooperation between employers and PHE institutions.

– How to include the latest findings/guidelines on quality apprenticeships.

The objectives of the Apprentice Track project are to:

in particular organising and monitoring the perspective of the three-stakeholder group involved (PHE Institution, employer and student).

with the efficient and highly responsive system for tracking, monitoring and adapting apprenticeships.

in the form of a set of quality processes which should be introduced, to ensure that the quality goals outlined can be achieved.

about how to ensure their role performance and optimize it with the use of the system.

– Ensuring that learning outcomes which should be achieved through work-based training are attained.

– Improving the quality, transparency and comparability responsiveness and of apprenticeships in PHE.

– Improving efficiency of cooperation between world of work and PHE Institutions.

– Meet the needs of employers, students and PHE Institutions in the field of ICT supporting tools, and

– Increase the attractiveness of PHE.


Project vision and mission Our mission is to develop digital management tools that support Professional Higher Education (PHE) institutions and employers to offer and direct high-quality apprenticeships. Our vision is that the digital management tools developed will be recognised as a model to improve the quality of the apprenticeships and will be adopted widely; updated and improved in the future by the users; and will serve as a basis for the development of formal international standards and guidelines.