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 ...

( 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 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). Koso ...

). The five Europass documents are the

Curriculum Vitae In English, a curriculum vitae (,

, 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.

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 acr ...

(Cedefop) developed and maintains th
Europass portal
in 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 Centre
promotes and provides information on the Europass documents.

Europass technical resources

Europass XML schema

Europass has produced an XML 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 w ...

, or

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, 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 pla ...

formats, starting from a Europass XML file.

Labels and help texts

Text labels used for the Europass CV and ELP ( European Language Passport) 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 t ...

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 th ...

* 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 program ...

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 Learn ...

. 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. Open ...

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 a ...

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 coun ...

. 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 CV

National Europass Centres

Europass interoperability web page

Decision 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