ICT is the Future - Integration through Competence Testing and Training was developed by three partner organisations: AiCS - Associazione Italiana Cultura Sport (Italy), CEPROF - Centros Escolares de Ensino Profissional, Lda (Portugal) and ZAUG - Zentrum Arbeit und Umwelt Giessen gGmbH (Germany). The strategic partnership was established for the exchange of good practices in competence development and social promotion, focusing in particular on digital and vocational education in order to strengthen key competences among disadvantaged target groups and enhance their opportunities for labour market integration and social inclusion.The foundation of the partnership for the exchange of good practice was the drive to create solid cooperation structures among the project partners and to jointly make a long-term contribution at European level in order to respond to the challenges of vocational training due to a changing labour market and ongoing migration movements.Refugees and migrants are one of the most disadvantaged demographic groups. Therefore, the need for digital education, which counts as one of the eight key competences required to achieve employability, is very high among this target group, as well as other socio-economically disadvantaged groups. Acquiring ICT skills, along with other basic skills, is essential for the future employability of these target groups as well as for their social inclusion and personal development in today's information society.Accordingly, the focus of the project was divided into two long-term sub-goals, the improvement of the digital educational offers for these target groups in the respective regions and an improved integration of refugees and migrants in vocational training and the labour market 4.0, as well as the strengthening of their social integration.The project team consisted of a non-governmental organisation in the field of sport and culture promotion with a focus on the social integration of refugees (AiCS), a vocational school for youngsters with an adult education centre for qualification and certification with an ICT focus (CEPROF) and a vocational training provider with a focus on professional qualification and labour market integration, in particular of refugees and migrants (ZAUG).Over the course of two years, the project partners shared their expertise in all relevant areas such as digital education, vocational qualifications, competence testing and certification, labour market integration and social inclusion of refugees and migrants as well as other target groups that are considered digitally excluded or disadvantaged. The professional knowledge and methodological competences of each individual partner complemented the specialisations of the other partners and thus enabled a comprehensive exchange of good practices in all areas addressed, stimulating new ideas for transferring and adapting approved methods for implementation in the regions and countries of the partners and beyond across Europe.The consortium developed a set of criteria for identifying and evaluating good practices, which includes certain quality indicators that the project partners considered relevant for their good practice collection purposes. Based on these criteria, the partners identified good practices that they or their partners have recently implemented and presented them to the consortium. The partners selected the good practice examples from a large number of practices, taking into account the evaluations of these by regional project advisory boards, which promised high relevance as well as great potential for transferability to the respective regions. The advisory boards consisted of associate network partners representing young and adult educational institutions, communal authorities, NGOs and experts working in relevant fields.The results of the ICT is the Future project are a catalogue of criteria for identifying and evaluating good practices in the areas relevant to the project and four collections of good practices with strategies for transferring and adapting to other target groups, vocational training areas and countries. This includes three national collections of good practices and one collection of good practices for European-wide use.Future projects that combine individual components of the various examples of good practices and develop them further so that they can be implemented in a larger European framework and in new fields of application are planned.

PermaVET aims at increasing awareness about climate change among VET trainees in various sustainability-relevant sectors and at developing vocation-specific competences in order to reduce energy use, save resources and process sustainable organic food. The idea is to make use of the permaculture concept to sensitize vocational groups for their specific potential in making a change. The permaculture concept has become increasingly popular in agriculture in recent years. It, however, holds additional potential for optimizing consumption of resources and energy that are meaningful for other vocational fields in environmentally relevant sectors.In this project, this innovative cultivation method will be tested in two exemplary vocational fields, cooking and electronics/mechatronics. VET trainees work on permaculture projects to develop green skills that are strengthening their profiles for a growing environment-friendly market in two sustainability-relevant sectors. This gives the them in-depth insight into current climatic change processes and options for climate adaptation as part of their training occupations. Trainees in cooking learn how to use and handle products from sustainable, ecological agriculture for a constantly growing business field. The curriculum gives them an additional qualification so that they can later work in catering establishments with ecological and healthy concepts. The curriculum gives trainees in electronics/mechatronics an insight into increasingly technological agricultural processes and they develop approaches to improve sustainability and optimize ecological production methods by using smart technologies. The focus lies on recognizing production steps in which energy is released unused and developing technical solutions to use this energy for other production steps.CEPROF as owner of a VET school and ZAUG as VET education center, both active in vocational training for cooking and electronic engineering, will develop the theoretical and practical parts for the specific vocational fields whereas Farm-Advisory will design the theoretical and practical input for permaculture and its impact on the environment. CIP having extensive experience in developing pedagogical educational material in various environmental topics such as agriculture, agribusiness and permaculture, will design innovative methodologies and didactics for the curricula of the 3 modules that will be developed.The first training module (IO1) introduces the topics of climate change and the effects on agriculture and climate adaptation through permaculture. For pilot testing, these topics are worked on with VET trainees in cooking and electronics/mechatronics in order to raise their awareness for the EU Sustainable Development Goals and to create the basis for completing the profession-specific modules.In the second training module (IO2), which is developed for cook training, the trainees learn to recognize the quality and taste differences between ecologically produced and conventionally produced products. They will also learn how to use these products, how to wash them properly, how to adjust the amount of ingredients based on their more intense taste, and how to make food in an ecological and sustainable way. In addition, the trainees learn important skills to be able to work in high class restaurants with a high proportion of organic food. An additional output that the trainees work on, is an exclusive international recipe collection containing dishes that consist of regional, seasonal and ecological products from the partner countries.The curriculum of the third training module (IO3) The training module enables the trainees to get to know the production processes of permaculture, to take into account material consumption and energy consumption and, in a further step, to identify the production steps in which resources remain unused. The trainees learn how to use these unused resources to generate energy for other production steps. By completing the module, the trainees not only learn about organic farming and deal with the important topics of resource use in production processes, but also acquire important skills for a later professional career.The modules are suitable for expanding existing VET curricula in a purposeful manner and are developed in such a way that they can also be easily adapted for the training courses of other professions. In this way it is possible to integrate a central topic of the EU's Sustainable Development Goals, the ecological and sustainable agriculture, into existing VET curricula and to combine these topics with the acquisition of important key competences for different professions. The agricultural cultivation method of permaculture gives trainees and trainers an insight into an agricultural business model that enables the successful establishment of small agricultural businesses and thus favors entrepreneurship, especially in economically weaker countries of the EU.