The lifelong learning could contribute to social and professional integration, mobilization of human resources in civics, social and economics contexts. Within the framework, lifelong learning was placed at the center of the strategic vision by European authorities to make Europe one of the most dynamic knowledge based economies in the world.

So, in accordance with the Lisbon summit (2000) and following the priorities proposed in the Memorendum (2000) and the Conpenhagen Declaration (2002), European countries recommend to give to people the possibility to continue training all the way through life and more particulary to obtain a social or formal recognition of acquired competencies and skills, resulting from informal and non-formal learning. By the way, people become responsible of their employability, in other words to make people capable finding a job, keeping it, updating occupational skills.  

From the on, social and educational public policies are aimed to act on people‘s development conditions, not only to releave distress provoked by these conditions. Lifelong learning is promoted within european countries in this context of predominence of individual responsibility.

European countries have shown intiatives to adapt their educational and training system and to create new processes. But, with regard to these experiencies, to manage to give real individual opportunitiesgetting a recognition of acquired competencies is very complex.

The Accreditation of Prior Experience Process (VAE) is a pertinent illustration. Admittedly, european practices are strongly rooted in systemics elements, nevertheless a major issue could be common within these various educational and training systems.

Indeed, the VAE process allows to obtain qualification on the basis of work and personal experience, without education. In the french labour market context, where qualification is a passport to employment and stable insertion, the VAE aims at fighting inequalities of qualification access. But, to create a new individual right doesn’t make it a reality.

Actually, the VAE itinerary is a complex process without certain outcome. Candidates have to overcome a succession of steps: demand for information, assessment of professional and social experience and put qualification to advantage. Consequently, the candidates have to mobilize some resources and factors to progress through the various difficult steps, during all the VAE path. But candidates are unequal and many disparities seem to exist between candidates’ trajectories, depending of different  individual, social and environmental resources and constraints, and depending of their use and their perception.

Therefore, from a Capability perspective, we built an original framework to analyse VAE candidates’ trajectories with regard to candidates’ real freedom of choice and action, as a synthesis way between the utilitarianism’s concern for individual well-being, the libertarianism and Rawls’s interest for necessaries resources and rights, in the aim to ensure individual freedom to choose and to act.

The work’s originality consist in asking the question of the “fair” sharing between collective and responsibility differently and highlighting existence of different types of individual logics of choice and action, which means different real freedom of choices and actions, more or less constricted by conversions factors and initial resources.

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