Traditionally educational programmes (after compulsory school) in most European countries are rooted on two mighty pillars: Vocational Education and Training (VET) and Higher Education (HE). But a decrease of the image of VET in many countries on the one side and a gap between competencies acquired at universities and labour market needs on the other side led to a rethinking of this segregation: Vocational Education and Training, namely Work-Based-Learning (WBL) resp. the competencies of skilled (both blue and white) collar workers gain increasing relevance in Higher Education programmes; inline with the corresponding recommendations by the European parliament and council (e. g. EU 2011).

Universities in most European countries developed programmes for non-traditional students (without university entrance diploma) and/or tailor-made adult education programmes for skilled workforce and/or practical oriented programmes, recognising Learning Outcomes (LO) from workplaces – but most programmes are only locally communicated and have only a short time-span.

The project LETAE aims at structuring the approaches of the 6 European countries Spain, Finland, Germany, Czech Republic, Turkey and Scotland via analysing and comparing national strategies on tertiary lifelong learning and chosen case studies. At a glance, we found that national strategies are often weak and programmes surveyed or analysed in detail often don’t follow those strategies; beside other reasons also due to the sheer amount of different programmes (details can be found on the project’s homepage). To structure the various approaches, a typology was developed; programmes were classified according to the following 3 categories:

* Is the programme free or does the student (or his company) has to pay (extra-) fees?

* Does the programme lead to a “normal” HE-qualification or to special certificates?

* Is it open for students without university entrance diploma or not?

homepage: http://www.letae.eu/ EU 2011: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52011DC0567&from=EN (all visted: 15.01.2016)