The Learning Agreement is crucial for the recognition of your traineeship abroad, and is an implicit part of your Erasmus+ contract (grant agreement). On a practical level, it helps ensure that you are clear about what you will be doing or learning while you are at the host organisation. As such, it is designed to protect you and ensure that you have a meaningful learning experience.

This very important document will outline the conditions of your traineeship, the skills and competences you will acquire, how you will be assessed and how you will gain recognition from University of Galway once the traineeship is completed successfully. It will need to be signed by your University of Galway academic coordinator or Placement Officer and by your host organisation supervisor BEFORE you commence your traineeship. You must ensure that your academic coordinator has a copy, and the International Office may also request a copy. Please make sure to keep your own copy in a safe place and back it up electronically.

We have posted an online instructional video to help you complete the Erasmus+ Learning Agreement here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9QABvm3O74. This instructional video will take you through the Learning Agreement step-by-step, and it will show you how to complete this important and required document in full. Please watch it before you start filling in your Learning Agreement.

The document should be typed, not completed by hand; working with an electronic copy will make editing easy and allow you to expand the sections to include as much information as necessary. Please be sure to insert your name in the header section at the top of the Learning Agreement, so that it automatically follows through on all the subsequent pages. Don’t forget to fill in the academic year!

On pages 1-2, you will be asked to provide detail about the traineeship programme, the skills to be learned and the monitoring and evaluation plans. No part of this section should be left blank. If this section is not completed properly and in detail, you will be requested to redo it. You should work with your University of Galway supervisor and your host organisation to ensure that you fill in the Proposed Mobility Programme in a way that is detailed, comprehensive and in keeping with what the relevant University of Galway department expects of you. Please ensure that the left and right margins of the individual sections are all set to zero so that text does not disappear at the sides.

If the host organisation is an overseas branch of an Irish company, you MUST give the branch address overseas, and you must give the contact name and telephone number of your supervisor there. No Ireland-based addresses or contact persons/phone numbers should appear on the learning agreement in relation to your host organisation.

At the host organisation, the “contact person” and the “mentor” should ideally be two different individuals. Footnotes 5 and 6 should help you understand the difference.

Make sure there is plenty of information under the “Detailed programme of the traineeship”. You can agree on this with your employer: what exactly will you be doing? You should give a description of your expected daily activities, and include anything the employer can tell you about your tasks, duties, working arrangements, responsibilities, methods of working … It’s intended that you expand this section to show as much information as possible.

The section for knowledge and competencies to be acquired deserves some reflection, but of course you can simply use common sense. What skills, professional experience, or expertise will you gain?

The monitoring plan relates to how your progress will be monitored in the workplace. For instance, will there be regular meetings with a supervisor to discuss how you’re getting on, how you will proceed, how you’re meeting objectives, whether there are any challenges, etc.? You must make it clear that you will be getting some kind of guidance and feedback on a regular basis and will not just be left to your own devices.

The evaluation plan relates to how your performance will be assessed, both in the workplace and by University of Galway – is there a report, for instance, that you must write? Who will evaluate your traineeship and how? How will it be evaluated in the context of your degree?

Language Competence of the Trainee – this can sometimes cause confusion for traineeship students, because the levels relate to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, a system with which not everyone is familiar. Non-language students often assume that A1 must mean excellent, but in fact if you are a native English speaker who is going to use primarily English during your traineeship, then you should tick the “native speaker” box, or if this is not available, the C2 box.

If you are a languages student, you’ll most likely be familiar with the CEFR, in which A1 denotes a very elementary knowledge of the language, B1 is average, and C2 suggests a very high level of proficiency in a foreign language. Essentially it’s a self-assessment system (see the CEFRL website) but you could use your OLS placement test result to indicate your level.

When you have filled in the Learning Agreement up to this point, you will need to have the Sending Institution and Receiving Organisation/Enterprise sections completed in full by your University of Galway coordinator and your host organisation representative respectively.

Make sure the details of the responsible persons have been filled in; then you are ready to ask these individuals to sign the document, you sign it yourself and that’s it, your learning agreement is complete. Your supervisor/coordinator should have a copy of the document when it’s been signed by all parties. Please send a copy to the International Office as well.

Please ensure that the final learning agreement that you submit to the International Office is presented as one continuous PDF document, not a series of individual pages.

For now, you need only fill in the first part (i.e., first 3 pages) of the Learning Agreement – at this stage, before you start the traineeship, you can omit the sections that relate to “During the Mobility” and “After the Mobility”.