The Governments of Flanders and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, FWB, have been urged to take steps to ensure that obtaining diploma equivalences ceases to be a hurdle for persons trying to land jobs in Brussels.
The call comes from the Brussels Advisory Council of Dutch-speaking Social Partners, the IBEFE vocational training network, and Brupartners, the Brussels/Capital Region's economic and social council.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the three organisations called for each linguistic community to automatically recognise equivalence decisions made by the other, noting that decisions made in the FWB are not valid in Flanders, and vice versa.
They also suggest expanding agreements with other countries, such as France, to automatically recognise certain foreign diplomas.
Further, they are calling for improved adherence to legal deadlines to speed up job market entry and want to facilitate access to procedures by allowing paper applications, not just digital ones.
An assessment of the required supporting documents should be conducted to reduce the demand for potentially difficult-to-provide paperwork, they recommend.
The organisations are also requesting a cost evaluation of each application and an extension of exemptions in FWB, as occurs in Flanders, to allow everyone to submit an application.
Furthermore, they advocate for the merger of the two services responsible for diploma equivalence procedures within the FWB and propose an assessment of the Flemish system, which allows higher education institutions to decide on first-year student admissions.
More broadly, the organisations call for the creation of a single online information point within the federation to streamline procedures related to the recognition of skills.
