Brussels, 29/05/2000 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has just given the go-ahead so that 3000 Europeans from 15 EU Member States, plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, may benefit, this year, from a period of training abroad. The budget is EUR 59 million. The candidate countries will join the programme during the coming weeks and thus will increase the number of participating countries to 30 and the budget to EUR 69.5 million. For the whole 2000-2006 period, around 250,000 people should be able to benefit from new knowledge and experiences in other countries, through the Leonardo da Vinci programme.
Placements (periods of professional training and work experience, whose duration may go, depending on the type of work, from 3 weeks to one year) and transnational exchanges (transfer of abilities and innovative methods and practices in terms of professional training, whose duration varies between 3 weeks and one year) may be financed through the Leonardo programme, which is presently in its second phase (until 2006). Let us also recall that since the start of the year, the participants in the Leonardo de Vinci programme have the possibility of benefiting from the advantages of the Europass-Training (information document and account given by an entrepreneur to the youth who did a placement with him and that constitutes a form of "Training passport").
For all additional information: E-mail: leonardo@cec.eu.int, Internet: http: //europa.eu.int/ comm/ education/leonardo/leonardo2en.htlm, http: //europa.eu.int/comm/education/europass/index-en.html.