Standardize vocational titles and courses for various professional roles in sales Erasmus Project

Project Title

Standardize vocational titles and courses for various professional roles in sales

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Quality and Relevance of Higher Education in Partner Countries; Cooperation between educational institutions and business

Project Summary

The professional role as a modern Seller today requires many skills and the profession has for many years gradually changed in line with the increased internationalization and digitalization. The greatly increased use of Internet and social medias as sources for collection of data and information has meant that customers today are having access to all needed information regarding supply of goods, products and services, but also full access to information about the competition among companies in the market.

The seller’s role has thereby changed to a more consultative role and they are more and more acting as a partner and expert to the customer, guiding and helping customers to make strategic and wise investment decisions. This change of role also means that vocational and higher educations in many areas needs to be modernized and developed to meet this new roles and requirements.

The qualifications this change of Professional role means, needs to be identified and anchored in the market, and this is important so that educators and trainers can create the necessary adaptations in individual courses within the various vocational and higher education programs in the Sales industri

This project objective is to form a staircase for qualification, validation and certification of personnel within the Sales Business. The result of this project will be used for recruiting different and well defined Professional roles of Sales personnel for companies, and more important for competence development and to support lifelong learning. It is important to create an impartial system without personal influenced assessments with a high security level in the system to avoid any infringement.

Four organisation from four different countries will be involved as members in this project and with the objective to develop an Industrial Validation Model for different Professional roles of Sales personnel throughout this member countries. When this project is finished, EQF qualification levels 5 to 6 for different professionals will be gathered in a uniform platform, and this could also be used as a Model for all other EU countries.

We have identified that Authority approved vocational training programs as well as other education providers both are using different names for vocational sales educations and training programs and that the various courses within this programs differ and vary widely. On the market and industry we have also stated a large use of different titles for the same professional roles, and this tendency has increased over the years to the level that an inflation of using varying titles within the sales business has occurred, which in many respects creates confusions.

Only on the Swedish National market, we has identified the use of 69 different titles in the Sales business, and where most of them are different titles for the same profession!

One of the objects for this project is for this reasons to establish a common nomenclature among titles used in the business and create a Standardization of titles among different and well defined roles within Sales occupations. Validation for certification is already important within the EU and will be even more so in the future.

Our main goal in this project is to develop and introduce an Industrial Validation Model for validating of qualifications for a number of Professional Roles in Sale. The purpose behind this Validation model is to increase the utility and use of industry validation for employers and individuals.

Companies are facing difficulties to find competent and skilled salespeople, and to meat this challange our Industrial Validation Model is based on qualifications that reference companies, recruiters and specialists in our Advisory Group desires of a modern Seller and this qualifications should reflect adaptations in edaucations and trainings.

Our joint venture project, should lead to a common Standardization on the Scandinavian Market where we together have set standards for both professional titles, vocational educations and trainings and an Industrial Validation Model that could be used by other EU countries.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 81224 Eur

Project Coordinator

Säljarnas Riksförbund & Country: SE

Project Partners

• Negotia
• Myynnin ja markkinoinnin ammattilaiset ry
• Business Danmark