Europass is a
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
(
Directorate General for Education and Culture) initiative to increase transparency of qualification and mobility of citizens in Europe. It aims to make a person's skills and qualifications clearly understood throughout Europe (including the European Union,
European Economic Area
The European Economic Area (EEA) was established via the ''Agreement on the European Economic Area'', an international agreement which enables the extension of the European Union's single market to member states of the European Free Trade Ass ...
and
EU candidate countries
There are eight recognised candidates for membership of the European Union: Turkey (since 1999), North Macedonia (2005), Montenegro (2010), Serbia (2012), Albania (2014), Moldova (2022), Ukraine (2022), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (2022). ...
).
The five Europass documents are the
, Language Passport, Europass Mobility, Certificate Supplement, and Diploma Supplement, sharing a common brand name and logo. Since 2012 individuals have been able to assemble all Europass documents in the European
Skills Passport
Skills Passport is an electronic document developed by WorldSkills Russia, which confirms the level of proficiency in professional skills in accordance with the national and world standards of WorldSkills.
Skills Passport reflects the overall resu ...
.
Europass web portal
The
European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training
The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) is an agency of the European Union. Established in 1975, Cedefop is headquartered and located in Thessaloniki region, Greece, and has a Brussels office. Cedefop is the acro ...
(Cedefop) developed and maintains th
Europass portalin 27 languages. The portal is the reference resource of information related to the five Europass documents. Its purpose is also to help all users create, with a simple
wizard, a personal electronic portfolio containing a curriculum vitae (with motivation letter), a language passport or any other document bringing evidence of skills and qualifications (copies of degrees, work certificates, etc.)
In every country,
National Europass Centrepromotes and provides information on the Europass documents.
Europass technical resources
Europass XML schema
Europass has produced an
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...
vocabulary to describe the information contained in the CV and Language Passport.
A Europass CV or Language Passport can be saved in Europass XML format or
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
format with the XML attached. Both formats can be imported into the Europass online editors or any other system that understands the Europass XML, ensuring that all information is properly parsed.
Web services
Europass Web services provide a standard way (web API) for other systems, software, and services to use Europass services in an automated way. An example is the web service which enables the remote generation of Europass documents in PDF,
OpenDocument
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed wi ...
, or
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...
formats, starting from a Europass XML file.
Labels and help texts
Text labels used for the Europass CV and ELP (
European Language Passport
Europass is a European Union ( Directorate General for Education and Culture) initiative to increase transparency of qualification and mobility of citizens in Europe. It aims to make a person's skills and qualifications clearly understood throughou ...
) are available in various formats from the Europass website:
* The
OASIS XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format)
* The
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
XForms
XForms is an XML format used for collecting inputs from web forms. XForms was designed to be the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner or with presentation languages other tha ...
* The PO file format is used in the
GNU Gettext
In computing, gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems. One of the main benefits of gettext is that it separates programmi ...
toolset
Weblog plug-in
The Directorate General for Education and Culture has co-financed the European project "KITE" under the
Leonardo da Vinci programme
The Leonardo da Vinci programme is a European Commission funding programme focused on the teaching and training needs of those involved in vocational education and training (VET). The programme is part of the European Commission's Lifelong Learni ...
. KITE offers an implementation of the Europass-CV as a
plug-in for the
open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...
weblogs
WordPress
WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...
and
Dotclear
Dotclear is an open-source blog publishing application distributed under the GNU GPLv2. Developed originally by Olivier Meunier from 2002, Dotclear has now attracted a solid team of developers. It is relatively popular in French speaking count ...
. The plugin allow users of those blogging services to store a Europass CV in all European official languages and export it into the following formats: PDF, ODT, HTML, XHTML, HR-XML. The plugin is compliant with
HR-XML SEP specifications. Last version of the plugin has been released in January 2008.
History
The Europass framework was established b
Decision 2241/2004/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 2004 on a single Community framework for the transparency of qualifications and competences (Europass)and entered into force on 1 January 2005 by its own terms.
References
External links
* {{Official website, http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/
Europass CVNational Europass CentresEuropass interoperability web pageDecision No 2241/2004/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 December 2004 on a single Community framework for the transparency of qualifications and competences (Europass)
Recruitment
European Union