The European Union memorandum on lifelong learning emphasizes the key conditions for effective development of lifelong learning skills evaluation together with the objective. One of the key conditions for success of the lifelong learning represents recognition of knowledge. The recognition of knowledge acquired through nonformal and informal learning, lifelong learning is to contribute to the approximation of the learning needs of a knowledge society. So, the recognition of knowledge leads to important changes in the educational systems on national levels. In the European area, widely diverse skills recognition models are known, which are primarily conditioned by tradition and relationship development skills between the worlds of education and work. Despite this diversity, we can distinguish four models of the national recognition of knowledge, namely: the Scandinavian, Mediterranean, Anglo-Saxon and Francophone model. The paper presents the similarities and differences by implementation of these models in higher education. In particular, we will be interested to know how the homogenization of the European Higher Education Area will impact on these models and how they will develop in the future. This is particularly important for countries in the area of the southern Mediterranean countries which want establish comparable standards for the recognition of knowledge.