Brussels conference celebrates a year of progress in promoting skills in leather sector
12/12/2012
The European Skills Council was created in December 2011 to take steps to bridge skills gaps in the three industries. It is an initiative of representative bodies COTANCE for leather, Euratex for textile and clothing and the trade union organisation formerly known as ETUF-TC (it’s now called industriAll). Collectively, these three organisations refer to themselves as the “social partners” who make up the skills council. The initiative is supported by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities.
Members of the body also include representatives from Italy, France, the UK and Belgium who are already working to boost skill levels in their own countries. The organisers call these representatives industry skill providers, or ISPs. Each of the ISPs gave a presentation at the event to explain the work they have done in the 12 months since the initiative began, with the Italian contribution focusing on the Osservatorio Nazionale Concia, a tanning sector information and training resource set up a year ago.
At the end of the event, the secretary-general of COTANCE, Gustavo González-Quijano, announced a series of seven recommendations that the skills council now wants to present to the European Commission.
It wants funding to continue so that the council can carry on its work with adequate resources (although Mr González-Quijano emphasised that this should take place without any loss of autonomy). Next he called on ISPs to set up national networks to help more EU companies in the three sectors become good sources of employment in the future. He then recommended that the European Commission use the skills council to make sure information on skills promotion goes to all parts of the Commission itself.
The fourth recommendation was that people involved in promoting skills in textile, clothing and leather should also tap into the work of other sectors, to set up what he called “inter-sectoral transnational projects”. This was followed by the insistence that there have to be good communications strategies, with young people in mind so as to bring a new generation of workers into the three industries.
Mr González-Quijano’s sixth recommendation was that all organisations involved in making training available to textile, clothing and leather workers, including schools, universities and training providers, should work together to create “a model of excellence” in technical training. And finally, he said all stakeholders should make a commitment to lifelong learning. “Things evolve all the time,” he said, “and new knowledge brings new possibilities to companies and workers.”
The December-January issue of World Leather will carry a detailed report on the conference.
Share this story:
