4. Understanding the diversity of partnership concepts and related evolutionary stages

The WLP project has taken note of the diversity of education and training cultures and of the enterprises’ readiness to cooperate with training providers. Therefore the WLP project has not focused on one single idea as “the European model”. Instead, it has analysed the variety of national partnership concepts. From the perspective of comparisons it is useful to distinguish between the following types of partnership concepts that reflect also different stages in partnership development:

1. Ad hoc partnerships (between training providers and enterprises) to arrange workplace learning for specific target groups or for specific curricula on ad hoc basis;
2. Outreach partnerships (initiated by training providers or by interested enterprises) to broaden the basis of cooperation and extend the perspective beyond single cases;
3. Networked partnerships (facilitated by training providers or by interested industrial organisations) with an aim to support systematic development of workplace learning.