CoVE Selection from 2022

European Commission Knowledge on CoVEs #Center of Vocational Excellence

CoVE Selection from 2022

The European Commission has recently published a list of the various centers of vocational
excellence projects that have been granted funding from the 2022 application period. This list
includes 13 four year long projects aimed at developing Vocational Excellence education all
around Europe.

What is a Center of Vocational Excellence?

A Center of Vocational Excellence, or a CoVE, is a network of partners with goals that tend to
include building local "skills ecosystems", providing learners with vocational skills, and generally
contributing to reginal development in industrial clusters, smart specialization strategies and
social inclusion.

CoVE’s characteristically achieve these goals, in part, through working in international
collaborative networks consisting of a wide range of local stakeholders. These networks are
designed to allow them to take a well-represented and bottom up approach to their endeavors.
This method also gives them a unique ability to quickly adapt to our ever changing modern
economic and social needs.

2022’s CoVE selection

The EU Commission’s Erasmus+ program has granted funding to 13 exciting new CoVE projects
from the 2022 application period. These CoVEs include a wide variety of organizations from
every region of the EU, and beyond. The geographic diversity of the partner organizations in the
2022 selection encompasses most of Europe, spanning all the way from Turkey to Sweden.
The goals of the individual CoVE projects selected for funding from the 2022 period tend to
focus heavily on two particular areas in vocational training. These are preparation for
digitalization, and The Green Shift. Of course, the prevalence of agendas addressing these two
themes is hardly a surprise, given the great significance which digitalization and The Green Shift
have begun, and will certainly continue, to have in the modern world. Projects developing
education in these ways also nicely support significant ongoing EU initiatives, such as The Green
Deal and Digital Europe Program.

However, other important issues were certainly not forgotten in 2022, such as social inclusion
and defense. This is seen very clearly in the case of ACCESSCOVE, which focuses on including
people with disabilities in vocational training, thereby contributing to a fairer society. It is
further seen in AILEEN, which aims to improve upon Europe’s defense capacity by addressing
the shortage of skilled workers in the aerospace and defense industries.

A Sample of 2022’s CoVE Selection

While it is difficult to decide upon which CoVE’s to showcase in this article, given the uniqueness
of each project, the following three have been chosen so as to demonstrate several of the
primary themes which the 2022 selection addresses.

Care About IT

Care About IT aims to utilize a close collaboration between technology and the European
healthcare sector. It will provide healthcare professionals with improved digital skills. This will
be done through the use of micro credentials, as well as national centers for vocational
excellence, which will be linked to a Europe wide knowledge sharing platform.
Some of the main objectives of this project are to prepare healthcare workers to effectively use
the latest digital tools which are being made available to their sector; to help remedy the
shortage of healthcare workers; and to support the implementation of new healthcare
technology.

Care About IT will be led by Stichting Noorderpoort, in the Netherlands, and will last for four
years. It has a grant amount of € 3.951.733.

HABITABLE

The CoVE Alliance of Centers of Excellence in Vocational Training for Sustainable Habitat and
People (HABITABLE) will work on improving the skills shortage in regards to nature conservation
activities. With the Green and digital transitions already in process, developments have
occurred that call for adjustments to be made in a wide variety of sectors, including that of
nature conservation. HABITABLE will focus on producing innovative, learner-centered teaching
methods, curricula on technical skills and key competences, as well as a system of certification
for micro-credentials in the field of habitat preservation and construction.
HABITABLE will do this by building a skills ecosystem together with a wide range of local and
regional partners, as well as centers of professional excellence in other countries.

The project will be led by Cluster de Habitat Eficiente. It will last four years, and has received a € 3.998.710
grant.

 

AILEEN

As briefly mentioned previously, Centers of Vocational Excellence in Aerospace & Defense for
Advanced Manufacturing (AILEEN) endeavors to contribute to the workforce in the Aerospace
and Defense industries. AILEEN will achieve this goal by setting up transnational cooperative
learning ecosystems for advanced manufacturing in the Aerospace sector. This will be used to
develop methodologies and tools which can provide specialized sectoral training as well as the
transfer of knowledge for Vocational Education pertaining to Aerospace and Defense industrial
production.

AILEEN has a particularly diverse consortium of partners. Not only do the members involved
come from all over the EU, but they also come from outside of the union. These external
partners are from Turkey and the UK.

AILEEN is headed by the European Federation for Welding Joining and Cutting in Belgium, and
has a € 2.837.147 grant for a four year period.

While the 2022 CoVE selection certainly tends to have a thematic prevalence towards the
subjects of digitalization as well as The Green Shift, their individual approaches to addressing
the areas which each is focusing on are quite unique, and undoubtably warrant a more detailed
explanation. Their innovative designs and the specific fields in which they are acting in are two
disparate to fairly summarize in this brief article. For more information on each of the particular
new CoVEs, please see the factsheets published by the European Commission through the link
below:

https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=26951&langId=en

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