"“Family firms have been the invisible giants of the European economy for far too long. It is time to stand up and fulfil their true potential in Europe! Family firms are crucially important for Europe. They make a significant conribution to Europe's GNP and employment, and tend to be great innovators, with a longer-term vision.""Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, Former President of the European Commission (EC) Scope and Benefits: Around 14mln EU companies (65-85% of all EU businesses) are family businesses, contributing 50% to Europe’s GDP and more than 60 mln jobs (60% of all jobs). Our project, SPRING, aims to help EU family businesses to fulfil their potential, by offering them a complete package with the necessary training, mentoring, support and guidance in the following areas:A. Smooth succession and business continuity, accounting for multi-dimensional factors (leadership, management, governmance, ownership, legal issues), through failed and successful casesB. Strategy for growth and internationalisation, built on innovation and regeneration.C. Development of entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship and interpreneurship across generations, converging the entrepeneurship and family business training content, promoting a start-up culture and an enterprising and innovation-based growth mindset within family businesses and considering other strategies besides succession (exit strategies, external investors in the company, etc.)D. Inclusive and responsible family business acts to ensure they adopt not only CSR practices but the full cycle (circular economics), to maximise value creation for all involved stakeholders, promoting inclusive entrepreneurship among the next generation members and female leaders.Main activities and outputs: Design and pilot an innovative and practical SPRING Training and Consultancy programme, jointly offered by renowned EU universities and adult training and consulting companies. This will be the first of its kind in Europe."

The project “VET for Employment” (VET4E), led by the Employers’ Confederation of Latvia (LDDK), aims at:- improving availability of qualified workforce through improving compliance of VET to the labour market needs;- facilitating and supporting organisation of qualitative traineeships and work based learning in vocational education and training (VET) system and- developing new tools for the use by the employers and VET institutions to promote work based learning in VET and to support employers, VET institutions and students in human resource development through traineeships. The motivation for the project lies in the problems identified in partner countries: rather low prestige of VET, limited opportunities for qualitative traineeships, low involvement of employers, low level of cooperation between VET institutions and employers, high youth unemployment, problematic transition from education institutions to labour market. In order to address these problems, project will carry out a number of activities aimed at improving availability of qualitative traineeship opportunities and to strengthen employers’ involvement in VET. The main activities planned to reach these goals are:- Carrying out a study on availability, quality and costs and benefits of traineeships in Latvia;- Organising learning visits to Austria and Germany to learn from well-established dual VET systems;- Developing an action plan for improvement of traineeships in Latvia;- Carrying out feasibility study on vocational education in Lithuania; and mutually learning between Latvia and Lithuania in the process of implementing VET reforms;- Developing IT tool on career portal prakse.lv (traineeship.lv) which would ensure opportunity to organise and implement traineeships and work based learning in easy and comfortable way, as well as to collect and analyse data on traineeships- To implement work based learning programmes in two sectors – metalworking sector and pharmacy sector. - To implement a number of initiatives/ mini pilotprojects to promote new IT tool, traineeships and work based learning in different sectors such as facilitating traineeships, namely, combining traineeships in several companies, career support activities, organising training for trainers in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Science, developing mobility projects, organising professional skills competition, certification of traineeship places, organising seminars, organising site visits of pupils or VET trainers in companies, examining work safety during traineeships, piloting examination developed and organised by employers.The main result of the project will be increased number of qualitative traineeship opportunities. The consortium is made of partners from Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and Germany. Partners include the national and sectorial employer organisations, trade union organisation, VET institutions, research and training institution, as well as private companies. Project is also endorsed by the Ministry of Education and Science of Latvia, National Centre for Education and the Municipality of Riga.