Project Idea

Sustainability is a megatrend and at the same time the challenge of the 21st century. Businesses increasingly consider the aspects of sustainability management as a factor of success for their future development. Various experiences show that the integration of economic, ecological and social components into daily business policies and - processes influences a more positive, innovative and future-oriented development of enterprises. Qualifying measures of the vocational education will thus have to consider these aspects in the future more strongly. There still doesn’t exist such qualification offerings at all or at least only rudimentarily for the large number of employees in small and medium sized enterprises of the European handicraft branch.

The main idea of the project is to establish a significant added value in the vocational education in Austria and the participating partner countries (Finland, Germany, Slovakia, Spain and Hungary). This will be achieved through the innovation transfer of an already completed pilot project – aiming the development and testing of an overall qualification and consulting concept for sustainability management in the handicraft branch of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany). Therefore the project is embedded into the Lisbon and EU Sustainability Strategy as well as the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and is supposed to contribute essentially to their implementation.