The Aquaculture Industry has seen rapid expansion over the past decade in many parts of Europe. With this expansion, has come the development of new technologies, and thus the need for a highly skilled and specialised workforce. Today, current and potential workers are required to have recognised qualifications, to be flexible with regard to the work functions they can carry out, and to be mobile within the industry.

Lifelong Learning
People are constantly learning everywhere and at all times. Learning is not confined to childhood or the classroom, but takes place throughout life and in a range of situations. Not a single day goes by that does not lead to additional skills, knowledge and/or competences for all individuals.

Lifelong learning is fundamental to jobs and growth, but also to social inclusion. This can be seen in the European Universities' Charter for Lifelong Learning, as well as in the latest news from the Copenhagen Process (Bordeaux Communique, November 2008) and the Bologna Process. The latest Ministerial Communique (Louvain, April 2009), leaning heavily on the Charter as it prioritizes 'the implementation of lifelong learning policies, with strong partnership between public authorities and HE institutes".

Validation of Learning in Europe
Learning taking place outside formal education and training bodies is crucially important for individuals, companies and society at large. However, learning that occurs outside the formal learning system is often not well understood, made visible or, probably as a consequence, appropriately valued.
Making informal and non-formal learning visible and validated is an intrinsically challenging task.
EU Member States are currently working to define national qualifications levels in terms of learning outcomes - what a learner knows, understands and is able to do - in order to link them to the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). The EQF is an EU-wide tool to make qualifications more readable and comparable across Europe.

With its eight-level reference matrix the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) acts as a translation device between national systems in Europe. It promotes workers' and learners' mobility between countries and facilitates their lifelong learning.

Some projects

VALLA (Validation of all lifelong learning in Aquaculture) is a 2 years European project aiming to demonstrate - using the aquaculture as a pilot - how to validate and recognize short-term sectoral training (including non-formal learning)

WAVE overall aim is to try and develop a comprehensive understanding of the primary production sector by work based competencies = A MASTER LIST of competencies for European Aquaculture.