Through an international internship, the students acquire additional skills that are of the utmost importance for subsequent training or their future professional activity in the IT professions. Our goals were to develop their intercultural competence, to promote their skills in the field of self-employment/self-management, to build up their foreign language competence and to acquire job-related professional competence in the field of international cooperation in the FOS IT team. The high practical part combined with the internship abroad and the associated additional qualifications (NRW certificate "International Professional Mobility", "Europass Mobility") should support the apprentices to obtain a training place in IT training. For the participating educational staff, we hoped to expand their own competence in the field of subject-related foreign language skills, inculturality in international exchanges on education systems and teaching methods, the development of authentic teaching materials and learning outcome units as well as knowledge of the Erasmus+ programme.
The tasks of the EU office are the consultation, initiation and support of European projects in vocational education and training with the participating educational partners. With the newly introduced FOS IT training course in 2020 and this Erasmus+ project, the aim was to show the institution Berufskolleg in the administrative district of Arnsberg as an example: how internationalization is initially comprehensively established in one educational program in order to become an integral part of the entire vocational college, its mission statement and its development goals in the long term. During the first three years of the newly introduced course, supported by the EU Secretariat, targeted mobility of FOS IT learners and training staff should be made possible in order to gradually transfer to the responsibility of vocational colleges. Public relations work should be carried out so that further vocational colleges in NRW are likewise interested in offering European professional internships for the FOS IT training course in the future. The potential analysis before and after the vocational, European traineeship of the learners should demonstrate that the progress of the learners in specific areas of competence is measurable.