With Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs), Europe tackles skills shortages by linking education, industry, and regions for future-ready training.
As Europe grapples with severe skills shortages that threaten the continent’s competitiveness, interest in vocational education and training (VET) is rekindling. In this context, the Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs), a flagship EU initiative for the VET sector, are attracting increased attention, most recently through a new report by the European Commission (EC) on their state of play.
CoVEs, which first emerged across Europe as networks of cooperation between VET providers and their regional ecosystems in the early 2000s, have been funded through the Erasmus+ programme since 2019 as partnerships for excellence. The 69 CoVEs can be considered the equivalent of the European Universities in the VET sector, with the distinct aim of systemically strengthening and developing VET in Europe as transnational lighthouse projects. In doing so, they operationalise the 2020 VET Recommendation. Most CoVEs bring together VET providers, industry, higher education, public authorities, and civil society, and connect regions through their international format.
The co-creation of learning and training offers is at the heart of the initiative: partners develop joint educational offerings, often hand in hand with local industry, and explore innovative pedagogical formats. Through their involvement with tertiary education institutions, many Centres also foster entrepreneurial skills as well as lifelong learning. Upskilling and reskilling are therefore another important mission of CoVEs beyond initial VET. But CoVEs deliver even beyond their educational mission. The report finds that CoVEs embody the motto “think globally and act locally”, as they target regional challenges and specificities while acknowledging that other regions may face similar challenges and may have already developed corresponding solutions. By sector, the most popular areas for CoVEs are the green transition, the transport industry & business services, and the digital transition.
The report highlights the multiple benefits of the initiative for different stakeholders: for students, the added value of CoVEs lies in access to high-quality, labour market-relevant training, enhancing their employability and entrepreneurial mindset at the same time. For the industry, the added value of CoVEs is notably the fact that they can co-shape training content to directly address their skill gaps and secure access to a skilled and future-ready workforce. Overall, CoVEs have been found to lead to sectoral modernisation and even policy reform through upward convergence of coordinated regional action. They are therefore increasingly contributing to a European understanding of vocational excellence, namely by providing inclusive, future- and labour-market-oriented learning and skills.
Some of the main weaknesses of the Centres seem to come with their main strengths. For instance, there seems to be a trade-off in the way these networks opt to deliver training: they are more flexible through modular training and micro-credentials, but this may be to the detriment of formal recognition, highlighting legal and regulatory boundaries. Concretely, there is considerable variation in the extent to which these qualifications and courses have been formally recognised and integrated into national qualification frameworks. Moreover, engaging industry partners in co-developing curricula is key to delivering labour market-relevant skills, but these partners often have limited experience in co-designing learning outcomes. Similarly, diversity across CoVEs seems to be both a weakness and a strength, as successful scalability has been slow given the diversity of structures across different CoVEs. Lastly, the authors point out that the sustainability of the initiative needs to be strengthened through better governance mechanisms and diversified funding sources that can extend the lifetime of CoVEs beyond their project-based funding.
Vocational excellence is currently high on the EU policy agenda, most recently through the Union of Skills (see SwissCore article) and the Herning Declaration (see SwissCore article). The EC has further launched a public consultation on the forthcoming European VET Strategy, which is expected to shape the EU’s VET policy until 2030 – vocational excellence and the role of CoVEs are expected to feature strongly in this agenda. The promising potential of this initiative has further been underlined by the fact that there is also a CoVE under Swiss leadership, funded through Movetia, the Swiss National Agency for Mobility and Exchange (see SwissCore article).