EfVET Member State Vocational Education Institute -ŠIOV (Slovakia) is participating at the “WellTo – Present Stakeholders for Future Wellness Tourism Skills’ Development” Erasmus+ funded project.

State Vocational Education Institute (Slovakia)

The project aims at designing a joint Administrator of Wellness Centre Qualification (EQF level 4) focused on tourism and wellness tourism have a potential to contribute to employment, economic growth and development in rural, peripheral or less-developed areas. However, it requires investing more efforts to ensure competitiveness and quality of tourism services and products, which will be able to complete the wide range of tourism products on the European market. The project WellTo associates the countries which support tourism development and have adopted long-term strategies, that include wellness tourism – Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Based on the survey among wellness tourism representatives, the project consortium consisting of 13 institutions was created to develop a new qualification – administrator of the wellness centre. The quality of this process will be ensured by the German project partner – the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB). As the first step towards the joint Administrator of Wellness Centre (AWC) qualification, the project consortium has elaborated AWC Qualification Profile based on the Transnational Occupational Profile that takes into account the specificity/characteristics of the work of the Administrator of Wellness Centre identified by employers in four partner countries.

For the purposes of the WellTo project, the Qualification Profile is defined as a complex set of learning outcomes (LOs), designed in professional competencies and the professional and general knowledge and skills needed to form them, as well as Learning Outcomes demonstration indicators, grouped into separate Units of Learning Outcomes (ULOs). Each ULO is a part of the complete professional qualification that can be independently evaluated or validated. For the elaboration of core Units of Learning Outcomes common methodological requirements and unit template were developed by the partnership.

Next steps

The project consortium has developed “Methodological Requirements for Joint Administrator of Wellness Centre (AWC) “Curriculum Development, including Module template. Modules which will form the basis of the national and joint curricula are being elaborated by country teams.

Based on the joint AWC curriculum different kinds of VET programmes can be developed for initial vocational education and further vocational education taking into consideration each country’s legislation. The programmes can be implemented in different ways: formal learning, non– formal learning, and WBL.

In November, the consortium met in the world-known spa resort Piešťany in Slovakia, to discuss the project progress and results achieved so far, as well as to plan further activities in details. In the following step, the project consortium sought stakeholders approval regarding the developed joint AWC curriculum. Thus, in the second half of November 2019 in each partner country stakeholders’’ consultation workshops were organized.

Partnership