- 2023Design
- 2024Approved/Agreed
Background
Norway is expected to face great needs for competence and manpower within a number of disciplines, especially within professional studies, considering the demographic calculations for Norway. This is particularly true in the fields of health, welfare and education, but also in engineering, as in location development and spatial planning, where the need for skilled manpower continues to grow.
Some studies in higher education qualify students for specific professions, such as teacher. Many of these professions are regulated by law and require authorisation, or they have certain formal requirements in their studies. Others do not, but still qualify students for a specific profession.
A White Paper on professional studies is a government measure to meet the need for more skilled manpower within these professions (such as lawyer, doctor, nurse, engineer).
Objectives
The government's aim is to have quality education in these professional studies and to ensure that Norway has enough employees with the right skills, at the right time, across the country.
Description
The government has high ambitions for these professional studies, which will be collected in a White Paper, expected in 2024.
Feedback meetings are organised to identify the challenges from the municipalities' perspective and listen to local and regional actors about what is needed to strengthen the capacity, quality and diversity of the studies in these specific fields of higher education.
The Ministry of Education and Research is planning six feedback meetings around the country in the period January - March 2023 on a draft White Paper on professional studies to be published in 2024. Universities and colleges, students, representatives from the labour market, etc., will be invited to the meetings. The purpose of the meetings is to map the most important challenges and discuss proposals for solutions. After the feedback meetings, from around Easter time until the summer, everyone will have the opportunity to submit written input.
The Ministry's first step was to organise feedback meetings. Stakeholders, including universities and university colleges, students, labour market representatives, and the National Council for Higher VET, were invited. The meetings mapped out the most important challenges and discussed potential solutions. Following the information meetings, written contributions were received from Easter to summer 2023.
On 5 April, the Ministry of Education and Research published the White Paper on professional studies in higher education. The White Paper focuses mainly on studies with framework-governed study plans, like teaching, engineering, and health and social studies. Measures from the White Paper aim to make education more flexible and practice-oriented. Changes in the admission rules are also foreseen, and the government planned to open up pilot projects where craft certificates as admission requirements for health studies are to be tested. The government also aims to improve the information for persons applying for approval of foreign education or vocational education.
Bodies responsible
- Ministry of Education and Research (KD)
Target groups
Learners
- Adult learners
Thematic categories
Governance of VET and lifelong learning
This thematic category looks at existing legal frameworks providing for strategic, operational – including quality assurance – and financing arrangements for VET and lifelong learning (LLL). It examines how VET and LLL-related policies are placed in broad national socioeconomic contexts and coordinate with other strategies and policies, such as economic, social and employment, growth and innovation, recovery and resilience.
This thematic category covers partnerships and collaboration networks of VET stakeholders – especially the social partners – to shape and implement VET in a country, including looking at how their roles and responsibilities for VET at national, regional and local levels are shared and distributed, ensuring an appropriate degree of autonomy for VET providers to adapt their offer.
The thematic category also includes efforts to create national, regional and sectoral skills intelligence systems (skills anticipation and graduate tracking) and using skills intelligence for making decisions about VET and LLL on quality, inclusiveness and flexibility.
This thematic sub-category refers to the integration of VET into economic, industrial, innovation, social and employment strategies, including those linked to recovery, green and digital transitions, and where VET is seen as a driver for innovation and growth. It includes national, regional, sectoral strategic documents or initiatives that make VET an integral part of broader policies, or applying a mix of policies to address an issue VET is part of, e.g. in addressing youth unemployment measures through VET, social and active labour market policies that are implemented in combination. National skill strategies aiming at quality and inclusive lifelong learning also fall into this sub-category.
European priorities in VET
Osnabrück Declaration
- Establishing a new lifelong learning culture - relevance of continuing VET and digitalisation
Subsystem
Further reading
Country
Type of development
Cedefop, & ReferNet. (2025). White Paper on professional studies: Norway. In Cedefop, & ReferNet. (2025). Timeline of VET policies in Europe (2024 update) [Online tool].
https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/timeline-vet-policies-europe/search/43665