Evidence-based approach in Erasmus+
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Evaluating the labour market impact of learning mobility: the case of Danish apprentice chefs By Søren Kristensen
1. Introduction Evaluations – or evaluative studies1 – of the impact of transnational mobility programmes or projects face a number of challenges that affect the nature of the evidence they bring to light. The most important of these is arguably the difficulty, both for ethical and practical reasons, of carrying out mobility activities as randomised controlled tests (the “gold standard” of impact measurements). This would require that a population of comparable individuals be arbitrarily divided into two groups, where one is sent abroad and the other kept at home as a control group. In real life, recruitment is based on the voluntary commitment of participants combined with a rigorous selection process, which in most contexts means that it is the most adventurous and competent that end up going abroad. Since they had a rich potential already before going abroad, it can be argued that they would have done well even without the mobility experience, and this will weaken links of causality between the dependent (the learning outcomes of participants) and the independent (the pedagogical intervention) variables. At the labour market level, the impacts can be hard to trace, as we deal with small populations whose contribution to a given professional field can be difficult to identify and quantify, and even harder to ascribe to participation in a mobility project, especially if this has been of a short duration. Moreover, effects of acquired competences (as well as the competences themselves) often only become visible after many years, and an evaluation carried out shortly after the mobility activity has ended (which most evaluations are) will fail to capture these.
Søren Kristensen PhD associated with the Danish School of Education in Aarhus University, working on youth mobility since 1987. Former director of the PIU-Centret – the national centre for mobility in the field of vocational education and training and national expert to the European Centre for the Cedefop in Thessaloniki. He is an independent research professional, member of the Steering Committee of the European Platform for Learning Mobility since 2012.
KEYWORDS
learning mobility, 1
A distinction can be made between “evaluations”, which are commissioned and paid for by a client (project
internationalisation
or programme owner) and carried out by researchers or consultants according to pre-defined terms of reference,
of vocational education,
and “evaluative studies”, which are carried out according to criteria defined by the researchers themselves.
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