The Lisbon summit (March 2000) set the objective for 2010 of making Europe "the most competitive and knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable growth and better jobs and greater social cohesion", while the Barcelona summit (March 2002) set the further objective of making European education and training systems a world quality reference by 2010. In line with these objectives, the Directors-general for vocational education and training in their autumn 2001 Bruges meeting agreed on further efforts to enhance European-wide cooperation and in the Copenhagen Declaration (30 November 2002) announced a strategy to support the development of qualifications and competences at European level. A key part of the strategy was to establish for vocational education and training a European credit transfer system, like that established for higher education under the Bologna Declaration. In 2003 a Technical Working Group was established by the European Commission to develop the principles of such a credit transfer system. In 2004, to support this work, CEDEFOP, the European Commission's agency for development of vocational education and training, commissioned three pieces of research to present proposals in relation to, respectively, reference levels for qualifications (the vertical dimension), a typology of knowledge, skills and competence (the horizontal dimension), and a system for credit transfer. This paper outlines the findings of the three research projects and discusses the road map agreed at the Ministerial meeting in Maastricht on 14 December 2004 which demanded completion of the model for the European Credit Transfer System for Vocational Education and Training (ECVET) in the first semester of 2005, testing in the second semester of 2005, and a formal proposal from the Commission at the end of 2005 to implement ECVET fully in 2006.