About Rainbow Project

RainBow

The Rainbow project addressed the EWF qualification system and its alignment with the National (NQF) and the European Qualifications Frameworks (EQF). It focusses on Quality Assurance at the European level for enhanced transparency and recognition of skills and qualifications, in accordance with the ERASMUS+ support for Policy Reform sub-programme.

BACKGROUND

The Rainbow project started in July 2016 and run for 30 months. It has involved EU Network, namely relevant stakeholders from the education and training sector and from the labour market, as well as international experts in welding, the EACEA and the European Commission.

Within its stated goal of continuously challenging and providing support to the Welding and Manufacturing Industry to better address the evolving market needs, EWF has set a goal, through the RAINBOW project, to guarantee consistency when aligning the Welding Qualification System to the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), thus to the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). This project has come on the heels of the success of its harmonised qualification system for personnel involved in the welding, joining and related technologies, which has worldwide recognition, which was started in 1992.

The EWF Training and Qualification system has been established in the early ‘90 and is used in 31 European countries. Currently, in some countries, international qualification and core profiles in welding are included in NQFs, and thus in some cases already somehow related to the EQF. This increases the risk of each country to assign different matches between qualification systems, giving rise to significant confusion amongst users, both companies and professionals.
In this context, one of EWF targets has been to align the European welding qualifications to the EQF. This strategy is crucial to achieve transparency and the desirable skills comparability and recognition for lifelong learning, employability and mobility purposes in the EU. The EWF methodology for mapping international qualification to the NQF and EQF has been based in a minimum set of learning outcomes, assessment criteria, students’ expected workload and allocation of ECVET credit points. It has also included quality assurance principles, as well as quality criteria for awarding EWF Qualifications.