Firstly, we wanted to make our students become more familiar with the operation of small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe, to give them an insight into the business practices of a well-developed Western European economy. Our proposition is that in their future career our students will make good use of the skills and experience gained during their mobility, not to mention the importance of putting the knowledge acquired into practice in the classroom. As for our second goal, we wanted our colleagues working in vocational education to become familiar with the economy, entrepreneurial and business cultures of the target countries, thus improving their professional vocational skills, business language skills, as well as further expanding their methodological repertoire, and eventually sharing their experience of good practices back at home inside and outside our institute. Therefore, the competitiveness of our teachers and institute could increase. The above goals of our project correlate with the objectives of our internationalization strategy in terms of our strategic goals, our mid-term goals (e.g. to make the communication of our institute more effective), or short-term goals (e.g. establishing our mentoring system).
We had established the internationalisation programme of our institution in order to acquire the certification of mobility, and now it has been built into our vocational educational programme. The establishment of the latter project was made according to the strategic goals of the internationalisation programme in the following fields: - decreasing the rates of early school leaving, - mitigating the difference caused by the social inequality of students and those taking part in vocational education, - maintaining and improving the quality of human resources, - adjusting our vocational training courses to the demands of the labour market, - expanding internationalisation, and the effectiveness of our networking, - improving and deepening environmental awareness in the school community. The implementation of our international mobility programmes will assist in reaching the above mentioned strategic goals, thus will play an essential role in the development of the maintenance and improvement of our institution and enhance its competitiveness. These were the reasons why, based on the opportunities given by our certification of mobility, we decided to apply for the two-year, extended programme.