International Conference - DECOWE

• Introduction
• Conference Contributions
  • Transition from HE to the LM and Early Career
  • HE and the Supply of Competences
  • Development of Competences at Work
  • Qualifications Systems; Methodology
  • Permeability between VET & HE
• Hegesco Final Reports
• HEGESCO in Slovenia
• Related Projects
• Some Interesting Participants
• Conference Committee
• Contact Info.

Barbara Nolan, , European Commission, DG Education and Culture

Barbara Nolan is an Irish official working in the European Commission since 1989. She is currently Head of Unit in the Education and Culture Directorate General, with responsibility for Higher Education Policy (including the Bologna Process) and the Erasmus Programme. In 2007, she was responsible for the negotiations leading to the establishment of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). She has held a number of other management positions in the European Commission including in the areas of Anti-Discrimination Policy and Communication. She was the European Commission Spokesperson for Employment, Social Affairs and Health matters from 1993-1999. Prior to joining the European Commission she worked as an Inspector of Taxes with the Revenue Commissioners in Ireland. Barbara studied economics at University College Dublin and The College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium.

We are pleased to announce that Barbara Nolan will deliver a keynote speech, "The Policy view on Higher Education from the Perspective of European Commission”.

Julie Fionda, , European Commission, DG Education and Culture

Julie Fionda is a British official working in the European Commission since 2002.  She is currently policy officer and projects manager, with responsibility for higher education policy, in particular on the themes of: the funding of higher education; graduate employability and the HE labour market; and peer learning amongst member states on the modernisation of higher education. Prior to joining the European Commission, she worked in the UK administration on regional development and social inclusion initiatives and began her career in the education sector, working on corporate development and planning. Julie studied economics and business in the UK (Leeds) and Italy (Ancona).

Andreja Kocijančič, Slovenia

Up until recently, Prof. Dr. Andreja Kocijančič was the Rector of the University of Ljubljana, which with its 63,000 students ranks as one of the largest universities in the world scale. Dr. Kocijančič began her career at the Medical Clinical Centre, Ljubljana, before joining the university at the University Medical Centre, Ljubljana. Throughout her career she has been extensively involved with the University of Ljubljana at the highest levels of its management, such as Vice-President of the University Medical Centre's Managing Board, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and Head of Chair of Internal Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine. Academically she has also been a member of a number of academic and professional editorial boards of publications and professional associations, including the position of President of the Council of Higher Education of the Republic of Slovenia.

Selçuk Geçim, Turkey

Prof. Selcuk Gecim is the vice rector of Hacettepe University. He is also a full professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the university’s Faculty of Engineering. His main research interests are solid state electronics speech processing, analogue and digital design and e-learning. Prof. Gecim served the Engineering Faculty as its dean for seven years. He is the Chairman of the Hacettepe Foundation, Chairman of Hacettepe Technopark Inc. and Chairman of the Hacettepe Technology Development Centre.  

Fritz Schmöllebeck, Austria

FH-Prof. Dr. Fritz Schmöllebeck is currently Rector of the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, the largest UAS for Studies in Technology and Natural Sciences in Austria. He started his career in research on the theory of electrical engineering at the University of Technology, Vienna. After practical experience in industry at Alcatel SEL in Stuttgart, Germany, he took part in building the sector of Universities of Applied Sciences in Austria. As chairperson of the institute for fundamentals in Electrical Engineering and program director for Electronics Engineering, he contributed extensively to the development of a large number of study Programmes on UAS in Austria. He has a strong interest in developing and diagnosing competences in vocational oriented higher education became a driving force for his work. Since 2006 he has been the Vice President of the Association of Universities of Applied Sciences in Austria.

David Coyne, United Kingdom

Until 1 August 2009, David Coyne was the Director of the European Social Fund (ESF), Monitoring of Corresponding National Policies I and Coordination at the European Commission. Previously he was Director for Education and Training Policies and Director for Education, responsible for co-ordinating the Commission's education programmes and activities and the Head of Unit for the Policy Coordination of the ESF. He was also a member of the private office of Sir Leon Brittan, Vice President of the Commission responsible (at various times) for external trade, relations with the US/Canada/China/OECD countries, pre-enlargement issues and Anti-Trust Policy. David Coyne joined the Commission in 1977.

Oon-Seng Tan, Singapore

Oon-Seng Tan is Professor of Education and a Dean at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Professor Tan is the President of the Asia-Pacific Educational Research Association (APERA) and immediate past President of the Educational Research Association of Singapore (ERAS). He is also Vice-President (Asia & Pacific Rim) of the International Association for Cognitive Education & Psychology (IACEP). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Educational Research for Policy & Practice (ERPP) published by Springer. He is a governing board member of SEAMEO Regional Centre for Higher Education and Development. Prof Tan was previously Head of Psychological Studies and his expertise includes areas of cognitive psychology, educational psychology and problem-based learning. He is a renowned keynote speaker at many international conferences in the USA and the Asia-Pacific (including Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Brunei). He recently delivered the National Science Foundation (NSF Education & Human Resource) Distinguished Lecture at Washington DC and also Presidential Address at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meetings. He has over 100 scholarly publications in books and journals and is member of many editorial  boards.

Martin Mulder, The Netherlands

Martin Mulder is professor and head of the chair group of Education and Competence Studies at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Previously he has been with the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands. He leads research programs and numerous research projects, including over a dozen PhD-projects. His research is aimed at improving competence development in business and education. He is (co)author of numerous books and peer reviewed articles, frequent speaker at international conferences, editor, chair and member of editorial committees and board of various journals. He was the 2008 Outstanding Paper Award winner of the Journal of Workplace Learning.

Colin Marsh, Australia

Professor Dr. Colin Marsh is a staff member in the School of Education at Curtin University , Perth, Western Australia. He has held teaching, research and senior administrative  positions at Murdoch University and Curtin University in Australia and research positions at Stanford university in the USA, University of Toronto in Canada and the University of London Institute of Education in the UK.He has given keynote addresses and undertaken consultancies in New Zealand, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Slovenia and Croatia. His research interests are in the areas of educational change and innovation, curriculum planning, development and evaluation. He has authored 31 books and over 50 peer reviewed articles.

Wolfgang Mayrhofer, Austria

Wolfgang Mayrhofer is professor of business administration and holds the chair for management and organisational behaviour at WU Vienna, Austria. Previously, he has held teaching and research positions at German universities. His research interests focus on international comparative research in human resource management, leadership and careers. He has co-edited, authored and co-authored 23 books and more than 100 book chapters and peer reviewed articles. He regularly conducts training for both public and private organisations, especially in the area of outdoor training.

Jordi Planas, Spain

Prof. Jordi Planas is a full time professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a specialist in the fields of Sociology of Education, Economics of Education, Politics and Educational Systems and Education and the Labour Market at the Department of Sociology. He is the Director of the GRET´s (Research Group on Education and Work), which is an Institutional research group of the UAB with 19 years of research trajectory. He is also an International expert in the OECD’s project on Systemic Innovation in Vocational Education and Training. He has worked for numerous institutions including CEDEFOP (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training) at the European Commission and the Institute of Education at the University of London.

Liv Anne Støren, Norway

Liv Anne Støren is a Research Professor at NIFU STEP – Norwegian Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education in Oslo. Her research interests are the transition from education to work; educational choices; immigrants’ educational careers; labour market prospects among immigrants by educational background, as well as competence development and requirements among persons with different levels of education. She was the coordinator of the Norwegian participation in the REFLEX project.

Søren Ehlers, Denmark

Søren Ehlers is Dr. Paed (Educational History) and currently Coordinator of European Masters in Lifelong Learning: Policy and Management (MA LLL) - a joint programme with an Erasmus Mundus status. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Curriculum Research, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus. From 2006-2008, Dr. Ehlers coordinated The LLL-EDC Study which was a comparative study of adult citizenship learning in nine EU member states. His research field is national and institutional implementation of LLL and his comparative studies have led to several journeys in India and China.

Jonathan Winterton, France

Professor Jonathan Winterton is Director of Research and International Development at Toulouse Business School, where he leads the Management Research Centre and coordinates its Employment Research Group. Before joining Toulouse in 2000, he was Professor of Employment and Director of the Employment Research Institute in Edinburgh and until 1997 was Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations at Bradford School of Management. He has published extensively on employment, industrial relations, social dialogue and training, his latest book being Trade Union Strategies for Competence Development (Routledge, forthcoming). Leading the team that developed the competence typology for ECVET in 2004, he has continued working on competence and coordinates EUCLID, a European network of researchers comparing different approaches to competence. He is a Visiting Professor with the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change at Leeds University Business School and with the University of Auckland Business School. He is currently developing research on restructuring and mobility in European labour markets.

Ambassador Piotr Kaszuba, Republic of Poland

Mr Piotr Kaszuba  graduated from the Faculty of Law at Warsaw University; he specializes in international law. He completed his postgraduate studies at the Institute for State and Law of the Polish Academy of Science. For almost a decade he worked in industry to start his career as a professional diplomat at the beginning of nineties. He has worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Minister Counsellor, Deputy Director at the Department of Law and Treaty Office and as Minister Counsellor, Director of the Office of Director General. He served in the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Hague as Minister Plenipotentiary, Chargé d´Affaires and as Consul General, Minister Plenipotentiary, Head of Mission in the General Consulate of the Republic of Poland in Stockholm. He is Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Poland to Slovenia.

Daniella Ulicna,

Daniela Ulicna is a senior consultant within GHK Consulting (Belgium), a company focusing on public policy research, analysis, evaluation and advice working for public institutions at the European, national and regional level. Her current work focuses mainly on European policies in education and training and national approaches to reforming education, training and qualifications systems though instruments such as qualifications frameworks, validation of non-formal and informal learning or credit systems. She has managed and contributed towards a number of comparative research, evaluations and consultancy assignments for the European Commission as well as other organisations (Cedefop, European Foundation). Her educational background is in European Public Policy and Philosophy.

Irena Kogan, Germany

Irena Kogan holds a chair in Sociology at the University of Bamberg and is an external fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. She received her training in Pedagogigs (Ukraine), Sociology and Anthropology (Israel), and Social Sciences (Germany). Her research interests include ethnicity and migration, structural assimilation of immigrants, social stratification and mobility and transition form school-to-work. She is the author of a number of articles in international journals dealing with immigrants’ labour market integration and social stratification. Currently Irena Kogan is co-directing a project ‘Young Immigrants in the German and Israeli Educational Systems’ (financed by the BMBF) and a project ‘Educational Systems and Labour Markets in central and Eastern Europe’ (financed by the Volkswagen foundation). She is also involved in a number of other projects dealing with the issues of migration and immigrant integration, education-job linkages, and methodological issues of educational research.

Nada Trunk Širca, Slovenia

Nada Trunk Širca has a Ph.D. in Management in Education from the Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the director of the University Centre for Euro-Mediterranean Studies; she is also working as a researcher at the Faculty of Management, University of Primorska in Koper. Prof. Trunk Širca is a member of numerous committees at home and abroad, such as the Professional Council of the Republic of Slovenia for General Education, NARIC - National Academic Recognition Information Centres, National Commission for Quality in Higher Education, and EERA - European Educational Research Association. Her research fields include management, quality and evaluations in tertiary education, and the introduction of lifelong learning in higher education.

Arzu Akkoyunlu Wigley, Turkey

Dr. Arzu Akkoyunlu Wigley was the recipient of a Jean Monet Scholarship to carry out doctoral research at the London School of Economics. She is currently working as an Associate Professor at the department of Economics, Hacettepe University. Her interests lie in the following areas: regional economic integration, economics of the European Union and education economics. Among her recent publications are “Human Capabilities Versus Human Capital: Gauging the Value of Education in Developing Countries”, (with Simon Wigley), “Basic Education and Capability Development in Turkey” in Education in Turkey (co-edited with Arnd-Michael Nohl & Simon Wigley). She is currently serving as a researcher in the HEGESCO project.

Keiichi Yoshimoto, Japan

Prof. Keiichi Yoshimoto has served as a trustee member in five academic associations: Japan Society of Educational Sociology, Japanese Association of Higher Education Research, Japan Society for the Study of Vocational and Technical Education, Japan Society of Internship and the Japanese Society for the Study of Career Education. He has been a member of the Central Council for Education since 2006, he was the national coordinator for the OECD project ‘Transition from Initial Education to Working Life’, the author of a paper on formal education for the OECD project ‘National Qualification Framework for Promoting Lifelong Learning’, and he was involved in the initial planning meeting of the CHEERS project in 1995 and served as a national coordinator of  the  REFLEX project (2004- 2007).

Kea Tijdens, The Netherlands

Professor Kea Tijdens is a Research Coordinator at Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) at the University of Amsterdam, and a Professor of Women and Work at the Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is scientific coordinator of the continuous WageIndicator web-survey about work and wages, which is currently operational in 45 countries. She has coordinated EUROCCUPATIONS, an EU-FP6 project aiming to build an 8-country occupations database (2006-2009). The database contains approx 1600 occupational titles, coded according to ISCO2008, translated in 20 languages. For web-surveys, the database provides a 3-tier search tree. Current research interests include measurement of occupations, industrial relations, collective bargaining and the upgrading and downgrading of occupations. She has published in Feminist Economics, Journal of Family Issues, Information & Management, Acta Sociologica, New Technology, Work and Employment, and Economic and Industrial Democracy (2x).

Gabriela Grotkowska, Poland

Dr Gabriela Grotkowska is an Assistant Professor at the Chair for Macroeconomics and International Trade, Faculty of Economics, University of Warsaw.  Her research interest lies in the labour market economics particularly in an open economy environment. In her PhD dissertation (2008) she analysed the influence of international trade on wages and employment in Poland during the transition period. Her didactic activity includes macroeconomics and international economics, including e-learning courses. In 2008/09 she was a Dekaban-Liddle Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Currently she is a Marie-Curie Fellow at Leverhulme Centre, Univeristy of Nottingham.

Kate Purcell, United Kingdom

Prof. Kate Purcell is based at the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick – a major European labour market centre in Europe in one of UK’s leading research universities.  She has conducted a series of longitudinal studies of graduate transitions from higher education to employment and case study investigations students, graduates and graduate employers, funded by a range of sponsoring EU and UK government departments and agencies, higher education stakeholder organisations and academic research funding bodies.  She is currently directing the most ambitious investigation of the relationship between higher education and employment ever undertaken in the UK: a longitudinal study that is tracking 2006 UK higher education applicants from the point of applying for full-time courses through higher education courses and into employment. She has published and lectured widely on her research, both nationally and internationally and served in a consultancy or advisory capacity to a range of labour market, research and higher educational organisations. She is a former member of the Executive of the British Sociological Association and been a Review Editor of Work Employment and Society.  

Selda Önderoğlu, Turkey

Prof. Dr. Selda Önderoğlu is an International Relations, European Union Education and Youth Programmes Institutional Coordinator, a Professor of Anatomy, a Bologna Expert, a member of the National Qualifications Framework Working Group of the Turkish Higher Education Council and a member of teaching staff at the department of Medical Education and Informatics. For four years she has worked on the implementation of the Bologna Process in Turkey.

Julia Evetts, United Kingdom

Prof. Julia Evetts is Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy of the University of Nottingham, UK. For a number of years she has been researching and writing about professions and occupations including women’s and men’s careers in teaching, banking and science and engineering in industrial organizations. She is currently working on the increased use of the concept of professionalism as a mechanism of occupational change and social control in work organizations and the role of the scientific and engineering institutes in the UK.

Buket Akkoyunlu, Turkey

Professor Akkoyunlu is currently Dean of the Faculty of Education and a professor at the Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technologies at Hacettepe University. She teaches and supervises e-learning and instructional technology related courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. Her main research areas include information literacy, web based learning, multimedia learning and instructional design. She has conducted research and published articles, books and papers in the field of educational technology, instructional technology, web based learning and multimedia learning.