The Commission Communication "New Skills Agenda for Europe" launched the "Blueprint for Sectoral Cooperation on Skills" to improve skills intelligence and address skills shortages in specific economic sectors. The Blueprint is a new framework for strategic cooperation between key stakeholders (e.g. business, trade unions, research, education and training institutions, public authorities) in a given economic sector. The Blueprint is initially piloted in 6 sectors: automotive, maritime technology, space, defence, textile and tourism.

What Blueprint means? The selected sector has to establish a partnership between businesses, trade unions, education providers and other stakeholders to prepare an EU wide skills strategy for the sector. The process will be supported by Erasmus+ funding by EUR 4 million per sector. One project per sector will supported only and duration of the project is set to 4 years.

At the moment the European Commission is considering sectors for a second wave of implementation starting in the autumn 2017. The sectors are chosen according to a number of criteria serving as guidelines for identifying sectors where implementation of the Blueprint is more likely to be successful and bring about impactful results. The construction sector is being considered as one of the more mature sectors, with high awareness of the importance of skills. The European Commission also acknowledges the importance of the construction sector and its contribution to employment, living environment and the economy. There is therefore a high probability that the construction sector will be selected for the second wave of the Blueprint. Three focus areas have been initially identified for the Blueprint project in the construction sector: energy efficiency; digitisation; circular economy, including bio-based and secondary recycled products.

Read more about this initiative in the website of the EC.