The experience of the CoVEs, born by a visionary idea of Joao Santos, is now showing its impact. The ETF conference “Internationalizing Vocational Excellence” marks an important step into this journey started 6 years ago. EfVET is present with an important delegation, including the President, EfVETBoard representatives, a group of members (from Armenia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, North Makedonia, Palestine, Spain) and the Executive Director to this conference. 

The Conference celebrates the conclusion of an incredible project “Internationalizing Vocational Excellence” where European Training Foundation, under the European Commission’s request, designed and implemented a set of key activities and tools to support the sustainability and exploitation of the CoVEs projects and the Centres of Excellence in the ENEnetwork. Internationalizing Vocational Excellence means to make those results emerging in projects of Excellence a value for the whole VETecosystem in Europe and beyond. 

Along these years, ETF has been able to activate an incredible partnership with EfVET, European Vocational Training Association – EVTA, European Association of Institutes for Vocational Training (EVBB) and the CoP CoVEs. This co-creation and co-implementation where EfVET have been playing an important role, has been also open to other key stakeholders, including UNESCO-UNEVOC, Cedefop, International Labour Organization, the EU Commission. 

Some key results have been presented during the conference, aiming at shaping the VET ecosystem with powerful tools, also emerging from the CoVEs work: 

• Peer-learning and knowledge sharing through an e-library of concrete practices. 
• A self-assessment system, ISATCOVE, based on more than 400 indicators to support VET centres to identify elements of excellence in their approaches. 
• A “cook-book” collecting instructions for transferable vocational excellence practices in several areas including innovation, inclusion, digitalisation, greening, among the others. 
• A catalogue of capacity building events in Europe and beyond to learn and be inspired by. 
• A Training Camp based on the learning materials and methodologies developed by 3 CoVEs, GREENOVET, Talentjourney Platform for IoT Vocational Excellence and Platform of Vocational Excellence Water. 

EfVET, since the very beginning, has been a proud partner to ETF, as well as to the CoP CoVEs: we believe that only an authentic co-creation can make a difference. CoVEs are going to revolutionize the VET ecosystem, but only the #collaboration of the main players can empower that impact and make it sustainable in the future. As mentioned by ETF Director, Pilvi Torsti, we need “a bottom-up approach, in a structured way”. 

We warmly thank ETF for their leadership, and we are confident the EU Commission, and namely DG EMPL and DG EAC will keep supporting the CoVE program also in the next MFF, as announced by EVP Roxana Minzatu launching the Union Of Skills.