AILEEN addresses the shortage of skilled personnel for the Aerospace & Defence Sectors by setting up CoVEs for Advanced Manufacturing (AM), supporting the recovery of the Aerospace sector, developing innovative methodologies and tools, with the nomination of the first Centres of Vocational Excellence in AM, to guarantee specialized sectoral training, and the transfer of excellence knowledge and activities in the field of education and training.With a bottom-up approach, AILEEN will disseminate its results European wide, testing its products at National level at a first stage, ensured by the implementation both within the consortium VET’s but also of VET’s from outside the consortium (that already demonstrated their interest by means of letters of support). The approach will be then transferred to the European level by means of partners networks.Project target groups cover current and future welding and additive manufacturing professionals (adults and youngsters); Welding and Additive Manufacturing VET providers; teachers, trainers & guidance professionals; aerospace & defence experts; relevant national stakeholders; policymakers and/or decision makers; National Qualification Agencies; Aerospace and Defence Industrial stakeholders and the relevant standardisation Bodies.The main expected results are:–Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing Aerospace & Defence CoVEs –Identification of existing CoVE best practices–Development of methodologies to nominate & award of CoVEs–Perform Advanced Manufacturing CoVEs’ Nomination–Creation of mechanisms to transfer best practices among VET & HE institutions–Perform a capacity building workshop for consortium VET partners –Pilot several approaches for training delivery: Apprenticeships, Applied Research and Competence Units –Mobility of staff program among partners

Industry 4.0, business digitalisation, artificial intelligence and KETs are increasingly taking centre stage, not as buzzwords but as pillars for innovation in all business sectors at a global level. The defence sector is no exception.Accordingly, all players involved in this field are experiencing evolution in business processes and human resources: the former in regard to technological advancements; the latter regarding the skills needed to exploit such technologies in the proper way.In particular, human resources need to possess or develop new knowledge, abilities, and competences to help companies complete the quantum leap which is expected from the “fourth industrial revolution”. The problem facing the European defence industry is twofold: (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) aging 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.ASSETs+ project aspires to build a sustainable human resources supply chain which allows defence companies to innovate by both attracting highly-skilled young workers and upskilling their employees thanks to customised, complementary education & training programmes addressing three main technologies: Robotics, C4ISTAR and Cybersecurity aspects related to the first two.The project will focus on 4 main activities:Skill Strategy to translate the selected technologies into actionable sets of relevant fine-grained skills to be (potentially) transformed into new job profiles;Design of three training programmes to address high-school students, university students, employees;E&T programme realisation and improvement;Development of community of practice (i) and body of knowledge (ii) to promote new skills acquisition, development and retention

The security sector is considerably evolving, by adapting the offer to the risk and threats and by permanently aggregating emerging innovations. The digital is disrupting this industry, by adding new capacities and new threats. The security sector is very fragmented. SecurIT aims to create a new global competitive security industrial (product & service) value chain by supporting a better integration of innovative security systems, with a cross-sectoral and European approach, to support the time to market optimization, the integration of privacy and security by design at all steps of maturity, with a cross-border collaboration between SMEs and other RDI actors. This vision is supported by a 4 step-approach: #1: : Analysis of the demand-side, mobilizing 40 integrators/end-users to identify their needs and 42 potential demonstrators including major actors as large industry, cities, critical infrastructures operators that will join SecurIT as user group, experiment hosting or supportive partners (26 support letters in annex - AIRBUS, THALES, ATOS, COESS, ECSO, cities, EEN etc.). #2&3: Involving supply sides (SMEs), aiming to get 300 EoI to participate in SecurIT and attracting +1000 SMEs to get part through outreach actions (15 letters of SMEs in annex). #4: Select and Support 63 innovation projects involving 126 SMEs with over 3,5M€ of FSTP through 2 Instruments of support from TRL5 to TRL9 (Prototyping and Demonstration/Pilot), and +700K€ in services provided by partners. Highquality experts will be involved in the SMEs selection process. The consortium is as a whole, with 7 Security and complementary Clusters from France, Belgium, Lithuania, The Netherlands and Denmark, coming from most relevant security / cybersecurity Regional Innovation Hubs in Europe, and the SecurIT partners have experience in open call management at national and european level.