Setting stage for innovation in watchmaking VETs

Both partners were newcomers in this Small-Scale Partnership programme and operate in a niche field without the benefits of scale and solid networks. Without the funding this type of collaboration would have not be financially possible. In order to create internationally valid VET-level trainings, the competencies of the partner organizations needed to be made explicit. We wanted to increase the quality of work and practices of organizations involved through this project. Watchmaking schools relied heavily on traditional paper-based teaching methods while even the watchmaking industry is modernizing and digitilizing itself. It is important for the VET's to benefit from the opportunities and innovation in the digital world, find ways to utilize new pedagogical approaches and ways to stay up-to-speed with the industry's development. We wanted to improve the curricula and pedagogical methods of the watchmaking schools as well as just learn to collaborate better across cultures.

We wanted to share the best practices and tested teaching methods with other watchmaking schools thus resulting in higher quality. The concrete objective was to jointly create a model of a clockwork escapement. Both partners were to work on a clock, each school adding a complication (e.g. a power reserve, date, moon phase). The two partner VET's would collaborate in this pilot and this would thus be the first step of a truly European clock. This project aimed to start a close collaboration between the two partner VETs and eventually extend the reach of the project to all watchmaking VETs in Europe by sharing the results with the whole network to help in finding points of mobility of teachers and students as well as future development project topics. We wanted to create a basis for increasing the digital readiness, resilience and capacity in vocational education of watchmaking by utilizing digital meeting tools and workspaces, by piloting it with a very concrete product to work on and proving it can be done. Collaboration was to be done in more innovative way through digital channels mostly.