Since 1998 she has led projects in new EU member states and in China and Indonesia. The projects in EU accession countries focussed on cooperation between vocational education and industry and involvement of social partners. She worked with federations of chemical industries, trade unions, national institutes for VET, companies and schools to improve the match between the supply of VET programmes and labour market demand in Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.
Mirjam is an active participant in European networks and EU funded projects. She was involved as expert in the EQF project TransEQFrame, financed by the EC (www.transeqframe.net). In the Leonardo projects ECTS and EQF for chemical workers, she explored transparency and comparability of competence profiles and qualifications of operators and technicians in the chemical/process industries with representatives from industry and education from 9 European countries (www.ects-chemie.de and www.eqf-chemie.de). Currently she works with the Workgroup Education, Training and Lifelong learning of the Sector Social Dialogue Committee Chemical Industry to prepare a project on the identification, assessment and validation of competences for operational personnel in the European chemical industry.
Before becoming involved in qualification and curriculum development for the chemical and process industry in the Netherlands and abroad, Mirjam worked as a mechanic in the metallurgical industry and was teacher and trainer in technical schools and company training centres.