Skills4Retail - Accelerating the Triple Transition in European Retail through skills. Vision The Skills4Retail project will focus on fast-tracking the ‘Triple Transition’ of Green, Digital and Resilience in the Retail sector, helping retailers to embrace ecommerce and ensuring their new business models are sustainable from the start. The project's goal is to design a new Retail Skills Strategy and VET Training Programme that will address the urgent and emerging skills needs of retailers in the key areas of Digital, Green and Resilience. It will focus on training fresh new talent for the sector through training programmes in VET Schools and Higher Education Institutions, and the reskilling of the existing workforce via work based learning and short-term modular courses. Mission The current and future demand for specialized digital and green skills within the retail sector will not be met by existing education and training programmes. There will not be enough skilled workers to fill the jobs, and they will be competing with digital and other sectors for the best talent. Europe needs an innovative new Retail Skills Strategy that can fast-track the upskilling and reskilling of existing retail employees and managers, students, workers from other sectors, and the unemployed to address the skills gap. The Alliance will work together to design, develop, implement, and disseminate a new Retail Skills Strategy and VET Training Programme that will tackle the immediate and future skills shortages across the sector. Outcomes The Skills Strategy & VET Training Programme will focus on the practical application of Digital, Green and Resilience Skills within the retail sector. The programme will be market and industry demand-led at its core, continuously adapting and evolving to address current and future industry needs and supporting European Retailers to achieve long term growth, competitiveness and sustainability through digital and green transformation.

Social Entrepreneurship Student Companies in the Baltic Sea Region -project combines entrepreneurship education, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural team work as well as social entrepreneurship. Our project's is about supporting young people in acquiring needed skills in the rapidly changing and global working life. Entrepreneurship is the tool for young people to make themselves more employable as well as active members of the society. Through entrepreneurship education and practical hands-on learning programmes, we believe that young people will develop the basic skills and key competences needed in the working life. In our project, students will set up their own Student Companies (SC) and that own company is the platform for their learning. Based on research, this kind of learning model increases the ownership and engagement of students. This project focuses mainly on combining entrepreneurial skills with socially and environmentally minded thinking pattern. For fostering partinership and cooperation instead of only competing with each other we will develop and implement peer assessment and feedback for students' ideas and performance. While young people create the student companies, teachers will work closely together in developing material to support young people's entrepreneurial learning. In the project teachers and JA Staff will develop a peer assessment methodology, create a material bank that will be available for all teachers teaching the Company Programme. We will also together create a concept for Entrepreneurship Diploma that can be then used a certificate in schools in the future. At the end of the project a Teachers Guide will be published for the future use of teachers inside the project countries but also all over Europe in the countries where Company Programme is used.This is a three-year project that will each year have 60 young people (secondary level students) and 15 teachers participating in entrepreneurship education and events related to that. Trade fairs will involve three times more young people who learn international selling. We believe that this project helps young people and teachers to create international networks that will definitely help them in the future working life. The skills that they will obtain are all life skills that can be used in any job and also outside in everyday life.As the result of this project Europe will have more open-minded young people who know how to work together with people from different cultures. They will have excellent cooperation skills and a practical experience about international entrepreneurship. Young people and teachers will develop their mindset in thinking about the social, cultural and social aspects of entrepreneurship.

The GREENT project (full name: “Blended Learning Design Methodology for Education in Green Entrepreneurship at Secondary Schools”) is funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the EU. It attempts to offer a long-term solution to a key pan-European challenge, related to the development of the green mindset of future generations of entrepreneurs and the need for transformation of the EU economy into a green and circular one.There are several issues defining the world today and they are likely to define the life of future generations too. Among these are climate change, the depletion of natural resources, air pollution, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, degradation of soils, and others. Exploring the reasons for them and the possible solutions from an entrepreneurial standpoint is at the heart of the GREENT project.The mission of GREENT is to create educational tools that support teachers in fostering a “sustainability-conscious entrepreneurial mindset” in their high school students. That mindset includes all the features of the entrepreneurial mindset (tolerance to risk and uncertainty, ability to accept failure and learn from it, self-directed learning, bias toward action, intentional curiosity and creative confidence), but viewed through the prism of a sustainability mindset characterized by holistic thinking, an environmental and social ethic that respects the value of all living things, responsible consumption, cooperation and teamwork, full-cost accounting, democracy, and adherence to the precautionary principle.The main aim of the project is to bridge the “gap” in the European educational systems between the need for new green skills for green jobs and entrepreneurship and the lack of adequate educational content for the development of such skills through an innovative training course for teachers in delivering green entrepreneurship education, utilizing blended learning methodology.Five organizations from the JA Europe network partnered in the successful implementation of the project: JA Bulgaria, SEN/JA Greece, JA Romania, Ungt Entreprenorskap Sogn og Fjordane (Norway), and JA Latvia. They have a strong track record in entrepreneurship education and are experienced in research, creating and delivering educational content, forming and maintaining effective networks of schools, teachers and students, as well as in collaborating strategically with public authorities in increasing the outreach of learning-by-doing digitalized programs. A strong feature of the consortium is the close relationship with the corporate sector and the extensive experience in making effective connections between schools and businesses in the form of mentorship, guest lectures, etc.The main activities undertaken in the project were:1) Desk research (http://greentproject.eu/2017/05/05/io1-desk-research-report/)2) Development of GREENT syllabus (http://greentproject.eu/2017/05/05/io2-green-entrepreneurship-syllabus/)3) Development of blended learning methodology (http://greentproject.eu/2017/05/05/io3-blended-learning-methodology-in-green-entrepreneurship/)4) Creation of GREENT sample lessons5) Creation of full set of lessons and teacher manual in green entrepreneurship (http://greentproject.eu/2017/05/05/io5-full-set-of-green-entrepreneurship-lessons/)6) Translation of developed materials into the partners’ languages7) Testing the sample and finalized lessons and delivering testing reports (http://greentproject.eu/2017/05/05/io6-testing-reports/)8) Pilot delivery in the classroom and consolidated report to summarize the results (http://greentproject.eu/2017/09/25/io7-reports-from-piloting/)9) Multiplier events – innovation camps in green entrepreneurship (http://greentproject.eu/category/events/).10) Final international conference (http://greentproject.eu/2017/09/30/the-greent-final-international-conference-inspired-all-participants-for-a-more-sustainable-life/)The most significant impacts from the project are:Teachers learned how to utilize new content (green entrepreneurship), methods (blended learning) and tools (online education platforms) to deliver high quality education. Furthermore, they improved their digital competences and their understanding for the demands of greening the economy.High school students developed green entrepreneurial mindsets, which improved their entrepreneurship, digital and language competences.A further testament to the significance of the GREENT project is the fact that it received the prestigious “Collaboration Award” during the Global Leadership Conference of JA Worldwide which was held in Atlanta, USA, in July 2017.Longer-term benefits are related to proving the appropriateness of delivering the topic of green entrepreneurship in European high schools and laying the foundation for a broader future uptake of innovative approaches, techniques and content related to circular economy and sustainable business.