The Institute of Tourism Studies, together with a broad European partnership, has just been awarded an EU grant to carry out a project aimed at promoting transparency and recognition of competencies and qualifications, across Europe, in the tourism sector. The two-year project which started in March 2010, entitled YES Employability – Young Europeans, Skills for Employability in Tourism, is financed by the European Union as part of the Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Learning Programme. The project proposes to tackle the need of the Tourism Education and Vocational Training sector for a workable system of validation, transfer and recognition, of skills and competencies achieved during formal, informal and non-formal circumstances, expressed in transferrable units, and that can be linked to national and european frameworks presently in use. The YES Project seeks to extend the work already carried out in a prior Leonardo da Vinci project, NEW Hospitality, which, during 2006 – 2009, carried out research and testing and developed an on-line database of minimum competences which allows the guided compilation of the European curriculum vitae. The YES project intends to transfer this instrument to a new spectrum of beneficiaries and integrate the database application with other Europass tools besides the CV. The Project also proposes to integrate this new product within educational and vocational training programmes in order to facilitate their adjustment to European credit transfer and recognition procedures (ECVET). The YES Project includes eight organisations and institutions from Central European and Mediterranean countries with ITS as the lead partner. These include the Centre for Advanced Studies in Tourism (Italy), ARTES srl ( a research firm from Italy), the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association, the Portuguese Association of Hotel Directors, SOFATI (a research firm from Portugal), the Technical Institute of Larnaca and the Cyprus Chefs Association.
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