Current Trends in Lifelong Learning for Preschool and Primary Education Teachers

Lifelong learning, as a specific form of continuing education, supports the adult's need to learn and improve, to gain social and personal success. The frequent changes that were registered within nowadays society require that lifelong learning programmes must be able to ensure the increase in employment opportunities for advantageous jobs, to maintain high professional standards on the workforce market and implicitly to improve promotion opportunities. This is feasible by adapting the curriculum contents to the workforce demand, by engaging the participants in the updating of knowledge they hold, by analyzing and reshaping the knowledge in accordance to the field-related research and the tracked scientific progress, by ensuring a balanced training of the key competencies in the target domain. Considering that lifelong learning is done, through a system of institutions, organizations and structures which establish hierarchical and functional relations meant to set coherence, compatibility and compliance to the quality standards in the projection, design and evaluation of lifelong learning programmes at national level" (O.M. 5561 art. 66, line. 1), the current paper aims to highlight the perception of teachers from preschool and primary school institutions regarding the programme offer for their continuing education and the manner, respectively the measure, in which these programmes have contributed to the development and completion of their personal competence profile shaped throughout the initial training.