2024

New Adult Education Act streamlines provision of micro-qualifications and clarifies requirements for continuing training

The Estonian government has approved and forwarded to the Parliament the draft of a new Adult Education Act and related amendments. The legislation establishes the basis for micro-qualification training and clarifies requirements for continuing training to ensure the quality of the training programmes.

Micro-qualifications are designed for adults seeking to acquire comprehensive skills through smaller modules, allowing for flexible and tailored learning paths. The draft defines the concepts of micro-qualifications and micro-degrees, detailing their scope, characteristics, and requirements for providers and certificates issued. The volume of micro-qualification training ranges from 5 to 30 ECTS, and upon completion, participants receive a micro-qualification certificate.

The legislation also specifies requirements for adult educators, ensuring that they possess both subject-specific and adult education competencies. Competence can be demonstrated, for example, by completing trainer´s training and holding a professional qualification certificate. These requirements ensure that trainers are proficient in their fields and capable of effectively teaching and supporting adult learners.

The law is set to take effect on March 1, 2025, with a transition period provided for continuing education institutions to comply with the new requirements. The requirements related to micro-qualifications will be fully implemented by September 1, 2025.

2023

Reform of professional qualifications system

Estonian professional qualifications system will be reformed to adopt skills-based approach, which enables to link the worlds of education and labour more smoothly. Estonian Qualifications Authority, in cooperation with the ministry of education, is developing a comprehensive system for describing, forecasting and recognizing skills. Education and labour market stakeholders are closely involved in the process.

The professional qualifications system based on professional standards has been implemented for 20 years. However, in today´s fast-changing world employers often look for certain set of skills instead of a representative of a specific profession. The process of amending professional qualifications has become too rigid and does not permit sufficiently rapid and efficient responses to the changes in the labour market and society.

Digital solutions and environments will be created for people to make informed work and study choices. In the future, the digital skills environment will enable to document all types of education (initial or in-service training, micro-credentials), help the user to match his/her skills for different fields of activities and gather information about learning opportunities.

Digital solutions of the skills system include the skills register, a services and analysis environment, a system for the granting of professional qualifications, an environment for assessing skills, a database of partial occupational qualifications and skills certificates, big data mining and analysis capacities, and the online visualisation and publication of jobs and skills forecasting data.

The skills description environment will be completed by the end of 2023, the skills-related services environment by 2024, and the analysis environment by the end of 2025. From 2024, the evaluation and recognition of qualification will be skills-based.

See more on the Reform of Estonian professional qualifications system.

2022

Micro-qualifications encourage rapid competence acquisition and wider participation in lifelong learning

Amendments to the Adult Education Act have been prepared to provide the definition of micro-qualifications, establish the volume of study programmes leading to micro-credentials, principles of provision and quality assurance mechanism. The amendments to the law are intended to provide for the following: 

• Training leading to a micro-qualification can be carried out on the basis of a study programme that meets the requirements set out in the continuing training standard (including conditions for enrolment and completion, learning outcomes and volume of studies).
• The learning outcomes of the program correspond to the level of the micro-qualification, programme or professional standard in the Estonian Qualifications Framework.
• The volume of studies required to obtain a micro-qualification is lower than for formal education and the acquisition of learning outcomes or competences is assessed according to appropriate and transparent assessment principles described in programmes or professional qualification standards.
• Training leading to micro-qualifications for the acquisition of specific work-related knowledge, skills or competences can be provided by higher education and vocational education institutions and other training providers (i.e. private in-service training institutions) recognised through the national quality assessment mechanism. Higher education institutions may award micro-qualifications in cases where these are part of a degree programme;
• Micro-qualifications may be obtained as part of a formal education programme, through in-service training, by taking a professional examination or by studying/working independently, and by proving the acquired knowledge, skills and competences to the competent authority using VNIL. However, not all micro-qualifications need to be part of a full qualification; higher and vocational training institutions may use VNIL for micro-qualifications, whereas in-service training institutions may not;
• Acquisition of a micro-qualification shall be certified by a microdegree, a partial qualification obtained via formal training in a VET school or a partial profession awarded by employers, a certificate or license awarded by the competent authority. Validators of micro-qualifications can be bodies awarding professional qualifications (also partial qualifications that may be equated with micro-qualifications in the future). Such a solution would work if the validation by an awarding body is sufficient for employers, so that they do not have to re-validate the compliance with the requirements of the micro-qualification (i.e. introduction of VNIL into the professional qualifications system);
• To ensure the uniqueness of the micro-qualification programmes, it will be required that a private in-service training institution can only offer a part of a formal training programme as a programme leading to a micro-qualification if it is agreed with  HE institution. Without such agreement, the programme will be considered as a continuing training that complies with the quality rules, being validated (VNIL), but cannot be accumulated to build up to a full qualification.

The draft will be completed in 2022 and is scheduled for adoption in autumn 2022. Beyond legal regulation, it is planned to intervene in the provision of micro-qualifications through funding using the Recovery and Resilience Facility.