EHFA advertised an internship at its Brussels secretariat in May 2008. The placement was based at the association's office and sat with the small team that serviced the board, the Standards Council and the association's growing programme of European projects.
The notice was published on 26 May 2008, and the placement was to begin in July: the terms of the post were set out in a document attached to it. At that point the association was running the ECVET project on credit transfer in vocational education and training, and its qualifications work was moving from an argument about principle into drafting.
Internships of this kind were how a secretariat of a handful of people absorbed work that the association's members had identified but could not staff: research for the qualifications framework, preparation for meetings, and the administration that the accreditation programme generated. For the intern, the attraction was contact with the European institutions and with a sector that was, at the time, only beginning to treat qualifications as a shared problem rather than a national one.
The association's meetings generated much of that work. It held its first European Fitness Forum in Hilversum in the Netherlands in 2008, alongside its annual general assembly and the policy forum it ran with the European Commission, and each of those meetings left the secretariat with a programme to build and papers to follow up.
EHFA advertised further internships in 2009, 2010 and 2011, including one specifically for its EU affairs work. The association's standards programme and its register are described under Standards and EREPS.