Europass is a European Union (Directorate General for Education and Culture) initiative to increase transparency of qualification and mobility of citizens in Europe. It aims to be a "Life Long Learning Portfolio" of documents containing the descriptions of all learning achievements, official qualifications, work results, skills and competencies, acquired over time, along with the related documentation. The five Europass documents are the curriculum vitae, Language Passport, Europass Mobility, Certificate supplement, and Diploma supplement, sharing a common brand name and logo. It aims to make a person's skills and qualifications clearly understood throughout Europe (including the European Union, European Economic Area and candidate countries).
Contents |
The portal is a central resource of information related to the Europass documents. Its purpose is also to help all users create, with a simple wizard, a curriculum vitae or a language passport in the Europass format. It is available in 26 languages. The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training is responsible for the development and maintenance of the portal.
In every country, a National Europass Centre promotes and provides information on the Europass documents.
Europass has produced an XML vocabulary to describe the information contained in the CV and Language Passport. A Europass CV or Language Passport can be saved in Europass XML format or PDF format with the XML attached. Both formats can be imported into the Europass online editors or any other system that understands the Europass XML, ensuring that all information is properly parsed.
Europass Web services provide a standard way (web API) for other systems, software, and services to use Europass services in an automated way. An example is the web service which enables the remote generation of Europass documents in PDF, OpenOffice, or Microsoft Word formats, starting from a Europass XML file.
Text labels used for the Europass CV and ELP are available in various formats from the Europass website:
The Directorate General for Education and Culture has co-financed the European project "KITE" under the Leonardo da Vinci programme. KITE offers an implementation of the Europass-CV as a plug-in for the open-source software weblogs WordPress and DotClear. The plugin allow users of those blogging services to store a Europass CV in all European official languages and export it into the following formats: PDF, ODT, HTML, XHTML, HR-XML. The plugin is compliant with HR-XML SEP specifications.