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Announcement: Stakeholder Workshop on Skills for Europe's Defence Sector on 8 September 2016 in Brussels

18 July 2016

(From ec.europa.eu)

The Commission is bringing together defence stakeholders to discuss upcoming opportunities for supporting skills at European level.

The European defence industry has to retain key skills and acquire new ones to remain in a position to deliver high-tech solutions in a globally competitive environment. However, the sector is facing challenging times which hampers industry's ability to manage skills through recruitment and retention.

To address skills challenges the Commission adopted the New Agenda for Skills on 10 June 2016, which introduced the Blueprint for Sectoral Cooperation on Skills to engage the industry and relevant stakeholders to tackle sectoral skills issues at a European level, based on a clear strategic vision and methodology.

Defence is one of the sectors announced in the Agenda to carry out pilots to develop and implement the Blueprint. For the implementation, EU funding will be allocated to set up industry-led sectoral platforms and carry out actions.

For the defence sector, a call for proposals under the Erasmus+ instrument is expected in December 2016 that could allocate up to €4 million for 2 years (2017-2018). This will cover 80% of eligible costs for a European defence skills platform formed by industry, training & education actors and other relevant stakeholders to develop actions on jobs and skills needs at European level for the next 5 to 10 years.

In addition, a call for tender under the COSME instrument is expected early 2017 that could allocate around €800,000 for 1 year (100% funding) to build evidence on skills shortages, gaps and mismatches and supplement the activities of the platform.

To present and discuss the above opportunities with the defence stakeholder community, to collect input on specific needs to be addressed and to encourage the setting up of the platform, the Commission is organising a workshop on 8 September.

To participate, interested parties are encouraged to fill in and send the attached form 

by 16 August 2016

.

Official invitations to selected stakeholder representatives will be sent mid-August. Places are limited and a balanced representation of stakeholders will be invited. Interested parties are requested not to make any travel arrangements prior to an official invitation.

Registration form