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Which competences do professional adult educators require? The article discusses this topic in a comparative perspective, finding that adult educators' required competences are wide-ranging, heterogeneous, and complex. However, it seems that certain competence requirements can be identified which transcend national, cultural and functional boundaries. The article summarises these requirements in four themes: communicating subject knowledge, taking students' prior learning into account, supporting a learning environment, and reflecting on one's own performance. The ability to train students to use what they have learned in practice (knowledge transfer) seems to be overlooked in the different competence profiles analysed.

Context: Aiming at gaining knowledge about students' thoughts and actions in deciding to stay in or drop out of an educational programme, an empirical study was conducted on dropout among 18-24-year-old students in VET and basic general adult learning.Approach: In order to pursue this aim, the study combined two sets of data: weekly student surveys and interviews with these same students. While the surveys provide a weekly snapshot of the students' thoughts regarding the probability of them continuing in the programme, their satisfaction with the educational programme as a whole, the specific lessons they attend, and the atmosphere at the school, the interviews contribute with detailed descriptions of the students' thoughts on the same matters.Findings: Based on the students' answers over an eight-week period, it was possible to trace a graph illustrating changes in the students' attitudes. These graphs can be placed within four categories of development: the stable, the positive, the unstable, and the negative. The latter can furthermore be differentiated as reflecting a stable decline, a fluctuating decline, or a sudden decline. In the interviews, the aim was to elicit the individual students' thoughts and actions at the points when their graphs took a turn. Conclusions:The findings show that the students' thoughts and actions concern matters both inside and outside the school. Furthermore, seemingly trivial matters in the * Corresponding author: viaa@edu.au.dk ISSN: 2197-8646 http://www.ijrvet.net 112 Aarkrog, Wahlgren, Larsen, Mariager-Anderson, Gottlieb students' lives are shown to have a potentially decisive influence on the students' thoughts about staying in or dropping out of a programme. These findings confirm the importance of focusing on students' decision-making processes in research on dropout. However, further research is needed to increase understanding of processes leading to decisions to drop out of education, including the qualification of methods to capture these processes.

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The article deals about the results of a study of school-based Assessment of Prior Learning of adults who have enrolled as students in a VET college in order to qualify for occupations as skilled workers. Based on examples of VET teachers’ methods for assessing the students’ prior learning in the programs for gastronomes, respectively child care assistants the article discusses two issues in relation to Assessment of Prior Learning: the encounter of practical experience and school-based knowledge and the validity and reliability of the assessment procedures.  Through focusing on the students’ knowing that and knowing why the assessment is based on a scholastic perception of the students’ needs for training, reflecting one of the most important challenges in Assessment of Prior Learning: how can practical experience be transformed into credits for the knowledge parts of the programs? The study shows that by combining several Assessment of Prior Learning methods and comparing the teachers’ assessments the teachers respond to the issues of validity and reliability. However, validity and reliability might be even further strengthened, if the competencies are well defined, if the education system is aware of securing a reasonable balance between knowing how, knowing that, and knowing why, and if the teachers are adequately trained for the assessment procedures.