Contrary to what the first impression may be, Trainframe is not about trains. Although it might have been quite lucrative. But this project is not about profits. It is all about empowering. Empowering trainers and educators and allowing them to pass this power to their students and helping them in shaping a great career.

Trainframe is a two-component acronym, combining the words training and framework. It is, however, much more. And much deeper. It calls upon the vast scientific knowledge and the empirical evidence from fields such as didactics, pegagogy and andragogy, psychology, marketing, finance and business administration, information and communication technologies.

Our idea, as we unexpectedly foud, seems to be inherent in the etymology of the terms used in the trainframe acronym. The Modern English word training is born in XIII-XIV century from Old Frech trainer, which in turn is traced back to the Vulgar Latin traginare (to pull) and Classical Latin tractus, pp of trahere (to pull, to draw).

Pulling those who we teach and train on the road to knowledge, drawing them closer and closer, motivating them to go further - this is what we, as professional trainers and educators, do. In this particular project, we will, once again, pull things from various fields and establish common grounds for building a working framework for competence based training and learning.

But what exactly is this project about? The Trainframe project is an endeavour of 12 European organisations to apply different approach to competence-based learning (CBL) and competence-based training (CBT). We acknowledge that both CBT/CBL have a traditional, well-established theoretical backing, but also acknowledge that they represent part of a whole, which we call a framework. We also believe that this framework should not be a technical compilation of principles, and should include afrequently overseen issue – that of the organisational perspective. What we mean by organisational perspective is that thinking of learning outcomes and training units per se is not a sustainable and practical approach to the competence-based concepts in VET. Organisational perspective means, and this we have learnt from practice, issues such as organisation’s size, geographical location, financial standing, administrative capacity, technical equipment andservicing, etc. Those issues represent substantial input factor to any complete CBT/CBL modeland their impact must be carefully studied.

The project aims at combining the existing CBT/CBL models, as being two approaches to a singlelearning offering, with the principles derived from the practice of participating training organisations, from research in the field, from the experience of the analysis of existing practicesin a number of assessment centres in Europe. Such an inclusive framework will then be complemented by the tools and instruments required, so that any VET provider could measure up and connect its own performance to a predefinedlevel in the framework. Those levels would in fact represent a typology of VET organisations, profiles with detailed descriptors.

Of course, the whole framework and the instrumentarium it contains will be tested for validity within the partnership, and the framework will be amended according to the results of those test runs and the accompanying test reports.