The main aim is to contribute to the establishment of a European lifelong learning space, by providing tools and guidelines by which mutual trust between countries and between labour market and educational field is achieved more easily.Background.Experiences from earlier projects tell that Europe-wide agreements on qualification profiles do not always hold when it comes to their implementation as VET-programmes. The implementation of the results of the COMINTER-project reveals that it is not a matter of course that the VET-programme corresponding to a Europe-wide agreed on profile is implemented the same way in the different partner countries and/or regions. The TIPTOE project intends to discover how and why these interpretational differences occur and, especially, how they can be overcome – or better – prevented. Moreover, the TIPTOE project draws upon the COMINTER-project and the HELEN-project to establish a method and guidelines of gaining mutual understanding between business or industrial sector and education and between nations and regions, based on content and argument. The way the COMINTER-profile has been successfully established among different European partners, is worth following. In addition, the solutions provided by the HELEN-project and its current successor project SESAMO for visualization of the relations between concepts by relational maps (using UML-code), proves to be an approach of establishing more insight in the correspondences, similarities and differences between systems (national, regional and/or sectoral). It is the aim of the TIPTOE project to apply these methodical aspects in a broader perspective – for the whole trade sector, to broaden them to interpretational and applicational guidelines for the translation from profiles to educational programmes, and to implement them, using the trade sector as an example.