Some of the challenges in the building sector are specific to each country, but most of them are common to the European territory. The BUILD UP Skills initiative has been organizing events to exchange experiences since 2011, the year of its launch. These events aim to promote the European dimension of the programme, the exchange of ideas between countries participating in the initiative, as well as the transfer of their know-how and experiences.

The 15th BUILD UP Skills Exchange Meeting was celebrated in Brussels on October 26 and 27, resuming the face-to-face format for the first time since the COVID-19 health emergency.  

The BUILD UP Skills initiative in Spain was represented by Construye 2030, and to talk about its results achieved so far, the meeting was attended by: Javier González and Beatriz Oliete (Fundación Laboral de la Construcción, project coordinators), María de los Ángeles Asenjo (Confederación Nacional de la Construcción), Sonia Silva (CCOO del Hábitat) and Nuria Pérez (UGT FICA). 

In his opening speech at the event, Hans Rhein, Head of Unit within the Life Clean Energy Transition programme at the European Executive Agency for Climate, Infrastructure and Environment (Cinea) highlighted the importance of results obtained in the more than 90 projects funded by the BUILD UP Skills initiative during 2023, and pointed out that one of the current challenges is to replicate and scale up good practices at national and European level. To this end, sites such as CORDIS showcase all project results and the BUILD UP portal, which offers a unique repository of tools and news. 

Other relevant projects 

Amandine de Coster-Lacourt, project advisor at CINEA, welcomed the recently started BUILD UP projects NS4nZEBs, REPowerEdU, RES2 and TOP CLeveR. Projects from other programmes, considered by CINEA to be of special interest for synergies, were also presented.

In this way, Monica Frassoni, president of the European Alliance for Energy Saving, presented the Pact of Competences for Energy Efficiency and Dragomir Tzanev, director of Eneffect, presented learning approaches for the new generation of EPC and the Smart Readiness Indicator through different projects (IBROAD, IBROAD2epc and Crosscert). 

In addition, Roman Horvarth, Policy Officer at the European Commission, presented the Construction Blueprint project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme and led by the Fundación Laboral de la Construcción, which developed a strategic framework of competences for the construction industry in energy efficiency, circular economy and digitalisation.

In this context, they also invited Beatriz Oliete, head of the training projects department of Fundación Laboral de la Construcción, to share the results of Women Can Build, an Erasmus+ project that she coordinated from 2017 to 2020 and that aimed to raise awareness and advocate for equal opportunities in the construction sector through various results that helped to make female talent in the industry visible. 

Spain was present along with projects from twelve other countries: Bulgaria, Poland, France, Romania, Ireland, Netherlands, Greece, Hungary, Croatia, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Lithuania and Austria. 

Participation of the project in the session 

In this way, the representatives of Construye 2030 participated in two of the four working sessions organized: 

• The first one had the objective of exchanging and sharing the work methodology and quantitative results obtained in the different Status Quo. 
• The second one dealt with the Roadmap 2030, an ongoing activity of the project, in which the countries have to propose a set of training measures that have to be formulated to address the need for competencies identified in the Status Quo. 

For more information on the BUILD UP Skills exchange meetings click here.