ASSETs+. Alliance for Strategic Skills and Emerging Technologies in Defence

Alliance for strategic skills addressing emerging technologies in defence (Assets+) is one of the projects funded by the Erasmus+ programme for implementing a new strategic approach (“Blueprint”) to sectoral cooperation on skills.

Assets+ aims to build a sustainable human resources supply chain for the European defence industry, that boosts innovation by both attracting highly-skilled young workers and upskilling its employees.

The European defence industry is facing a twofold problem: (i) it is experiencing difficulty in finding the necessary skills in order to sustain its leadership, competitiveness and sustainability in the medium- to long-term; (ii) ageing staff and difficulties in engaging and keeping young professionals are preventing the sector from reshaping company capabilities and creating new, attractive job opportunities for talented workers of any age.

During Assets+, new training programmes and courses on emerging technologies for human resources in defence will be designed and developed, to contribute to enhancing European sovereignty and autonomy. These will focus on three key areas: robotics, C4ISTAR and cybersecurity aspects related to the first two.

The project's main activities will be:

1. skill strategy to translate the selected technologies into actionable sets of relevant fine-grained skills to be (potentially) transformed into new job profiles;

2. design of three training programmes to address high-school students, university students, employees;

3. E&T programme realisation and improvement;

4. development of community of practice and body of knowledge to promote new skills acquisition, development and retention.

Assets+ is built on close collaboration between the Defence Industry, sectoral organisations, HEIs, VET providers and research centres, with 30 partners from 8 countries and a broader ecosystem of stakeholders.

FGB is leading two out of eigth work packages:

• WP5: Communication and dissemination
• WP6: Quality assurance and monitoring

FGB also leads the task on Skills2ESCO on setting up an “agile” process to integrate new occupational profiles within ESCO under WP1 on Technology and skills analysis.

Līga Baltiņa is leading both work packages on behalf of FGB.

Other project partners