2004 was a momentous year for Europe and for the ETF. The European Union welcomed ten new members, previously ETF's partners, after a decade of hard work and preparations. And in July 2004 Muriel Dunbar took over as director from Peter de Rooij.

2004 was a momentous year for Europe and for the ETF. The European Union welcomed ten new members, previously ETF's partners, after a decade of hard work and preparations. It was the year that a new framework for the EU’s foreign policy took shape, the new European Neighbourhood Policy, with its increasing focus on human resources development. And in July 2004 Muriel Dunbar took over as director from Peter de Rooij. Highlights - The ETF in 2004 looks at the implications of these developments for the ETF and places them in a broader European perspective. It explains how the work of the ETF is evolving in line with the latest thinking on human resource development in areas such as the informal economy, the fight against poverty or donors cooperation. It picks out some of the projects the ETF was involved in during 2004, such as facilitating decentralisation of VET in Tajikistan, training for democracy in the universities of FYR Macedonia, launching apprenticeships and social dialogue in Syria, e-learning in Israel and peer reviews in South-Eastern Europe. These accounts of the ETF’s work “give a flavour of the wide range of technical issues that must be confronted on the road to social and economic growth and stability,” says ETF director Muriel Dunbar, “they also show the scale of the task faced by partner countries.” Highlights - The ETF in 2004 was published in the 20 official languages of the EU, plus Arabic, Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Serbo-Croat. The foreword is by the new EU commissioner for education, training, culture and multilingualism, Ján Figel’. It is accompanied by a CD containing the ETF promotional film Learning without frontiers and a selection of ETF publications and press releases on the year’s major events.