Involving representatives of professional associations and the business sector, event participants discussed about identifying priority training schemes for energy efficiency skills that are currently missing and mutual recognition by the countries, and about the existing or lacking national professional standards concerning the identified occupations. Participants put forward proposals for new or modified occupations, they presented an overview of the existing regulations and the existing training schemes, as well as comparison of professional capabilities, aiming at raising the awareness of the benefits from energy skills.
The project involves organizing events of this type in all five countries, aiming to raise the awareness of the importance of skills and their value, further initiating activities in terms of proposals to strengthen the legislation on energy efficiency in buildings, which is in fact the second component of the European Green Deal.
SEEtheSkills project builds upon the experience and results of the three previous projects, and the main goal of the fourth project stage is to achieve greater visibility, access and recognition of the energy skills among partner countries, through cross validation based on learning outcomes, and by applying a new 3V approach (visible, validated, and valuable) to directly stimulate the demand for energy skills on the construction market.Project team members are intensely working on creating broad, integrated database of certified workers, of available energy efficiency trainings, and of companies that hire certified persons, as well as a catalogue of energy efficient materials. The integrated energy skills database will consist of data varying in content, format, size, and in scope. For example, it will provide training schemes for a given occupation developed by separate institutions from separate countries, which differ in course length, training contents, volume of training material, approach to delivering the training, etc.
The three-year SEEtheSkills project is part of the European BUILD UP Skills initiative. For the fourth time, the Economic Chamber of North Macedonia is successfully coordinating projects under the European research and innovation program Horizon 2020, implementing this project in cooperation with 10 partners, 4 of which are European Union member states.
