Crediting of competences towards the degree programme (APEL)

Svenia Müller is a trained health and nursing professional. After her vocational training, she worked for five years in inpatient care for the elderly and after the second year took over responsibility for quality management at the facility. For this, the facility also sent her to further training. Above all, she has been doing this job continuously since then and has already gained some experience. Now she wants to develop professionally and has decided to study nursing management part-time. Since she wants to stay with a foothold in practice, she likes the possibility of studying part-time. Studying one module less has clear advantages. Since there is also a quality management module in the degree programme, she would like to have that credited. However, she refrains from the theoretical possibility of possibly having the module on professional field orientation recognised, because she already takes on management tasks in practice. After all, this is her chance to take another look at management in other areas of care.

Tim Meier has been working as one of the few male "midwives" in Germany for several years and is now involved in midwifery training. As he now knows only too well the responsibility associated with this profession, he decided to go back to school himself and study midwifery. Compared to the beginners, however, he has quite a bit of knowledge. That's why he likes to take advantage of the simplified recognition procedure and decides to really take a break for two years and finish his studies full-time during this time. After that, he would like to do a master's degree in education.

Indira Schneider has decided to finally study the Master in Public Health after her studies in health promotion and some work experience in a research project. The project was about peer involvement in health promotion. Together with her boss, she has already published several scientific articles about the project in a scientific journal, one of them as first author. In these articles, she explained the theoretical basis of peer involvement and reviewed the current state of research on the subject. She is considering whether this is enough to be credited with the health promotion module in the Master's programme?

Competences are the abilities of a person to perform a certain task or solve a problem. To do that, you have to know or understand things, you have to be able to apply that knowledge practically, you have to make decisions to a certain extent, you have to communicate appropriately with others about things you are doing and you have to be able to check whether what you are doing has had the desired effect and learn from it further.

For example, at the train station in Fulda, someone asks you in English for directions to the university. To solve this task, you need to know how to get to the university yourself and you need to know the vocabulary for giving directions. But you also need a certain amount of language practice to be able to formulate correct sentences fluently and understandably. You communicate naturally and make sure that your description is understood. And you make decisions: For example, you can describe the way on foot or by bus, you can ask whether your interlocutor prefers to walk or you can simply invite your counterpart to walk the way with you. To a certain extent, you take responsibility for whether your interlocutor arrives at the university.

According to the "German Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning" (DQR), a distinction is made between knowledge, skills, social competence and independence, which together make up a certain competence. So it's about more than just knowledge.

With a little manual skill, many people are able to build something usable as a table from a board and two supports. If you commission a carpenter to build a table for you, the result will probably be somewhat different. So competences can be at different levels. The DQR distinguishes eight different levels of competence. At the end of a Bachelor's degree, you should have competences relevant to your field at level 6. In Germany, for example, the completion of nursing training or training in physiotherapy is classified at level 4. For this reason alone, it is not possible to recognise the full extent of vocational training as a midwife, for example, towards the degree, but only up to a maximum of half the extent of the degree.

For example, what can someone do better if they study physiotherapy compared to someone who has completed physiotherapy training? Both should be able to treat patients, but at different levels. In the language used to describe competences, it goes something like this: