"For Textiles Sector's companies (especially SMEs), the circular economy provides an opportunity to create new profit streams, increase their resilience to volatile input costs, and support their efforts to become completely sustainable and socially responsible. The market for ""green textiles"" is in an expanding development, reflecting the big change in the consumer behaviour, worldwide, representing a huge opportunity of growth for the Textiles sector in Europe. Global waste and environmental impacts that textiles and apparel production create, can be reduced through the design and manufacturing of products that follow circular economy guidelines or the creation of products with a low carbon impact. That said, a number of barriers will need to be overcome in order for the circular economy in the Textiles sector to become a reality. Skilled and well qualified workers can play a critical role in addressing these barriers and creating opportunities to guide the shift to circularity. Indeed, the Textiles' Sector requires a more qualified workforce to deal with new technologies, stimulate innovation, ensure quality management and develop international strategies and marketing. Therefore, the availability of adequately skilled workers has become one of the major issues for the Textiles industry as the majority of the companies still faced the shortage of trained and qualified personnel in green and circular economy techniques in both design and manufacturing. This segment of textiles is constituted by SMEs without qualified resources in the matter of sustainability, for whom it's important to develop competences and skills in this field. EU Textile industries urgently need a flexible workforce that can respond to the development and the globalized market and the need for sustainable design and manufacturing in order to respond to the global demand for sustainable creative products. Although there is no standardized approach to engage circular economy practices in textiles sector, there are many creative solutions being explored. In this frame the main objective of the project ECO-TEX is to design, develop and piloting a new job qualification profile and correspondent training curricula on the subject of ""How to implement circular economy techniques in Textiles Industry"" able to cope with the visible shortage of vocational skills, potentiating the best use of the outcomes in the field of design patterns, use of recycle materials, machinery, processes, developed in the frame of other EU and non EU funded Research & Development Projects with sustainable purposes, improving competitiveness in Textiles, based on the development of skills and competences of the workforce. As many studies show ""education for a circular economy does not simply bail down to just more time spent on ""economy literacy"" and systems literacy - it's the mindset around why this is important and the vision that underpins this mindset"". The project's specific objectives are the following: - To develop a deep knowledge on occupation and training needs to implement sustainable manufacturing in Textiles Sector and possible already existing learning opportunities; - To develop a new occupation/qualification profile of the expert in sustainability, capable to deal with all the frameworks around sustainability; - To develop a training toolkit able to cope with the identified training needs, according to European Common Framework on Vocation, Educational Training (ECVET); - To develop innovative training units; - To development the e-learning courses; - To develop the digital training platform as an innovative open distance - learning ICT tool - To pilot the results; - To create awareness for the need of a sustainable manufacturing strategy; - To exploit results through European, national and local networks and platforms, enterprises, business organisations, guidance organisations, as well as other relevant media, inside and outside Europe. - To enlarge the networking between the partners."

Over the years, fashion industries have played and continue to play key role in the competitiveness of the European economy. With almost 850 000 companies, 5 million jobs, and another 3 million jobs to be found throughout the supply chain, the Fashion industry can contribute to further economic growth and a strengthening of the competitive position of the EU economy as a whole.Due to pressures for change resulting notably from trade liberalization and increasing external competition, consumer developments, technological advances, changes in production costs and environmental issues, the fashion industries are characterized by continuing restructuring and modernization. This change indeed requires a more qualified workforce to deal with new technologies, stimulate innovation, ensure quality management and develop international strategies and marketing. Therefore, the availability of adequately skilled workers has become one of the major issues for the fashion industries. Fashion industries faced the shortage of trained and qualified personnel for their export and fashion marketing departments. Recognizing their critical role, recent European efforts, such as the European Skills Council of Textile Clothing Leather & Footwear and the European Fashion Industries Alliance, have come together in order to strengthen the comparative advantages of the fashion industries which include, among others, the well-educated and high-skilled professional workforce of the industry. Other factors include the rapid advance of digital technologies, the globalisation of networks and the deregulation of media. Employees from the fashion industries, students and SME’s, who would like to succeed, have to adapt to globalised market and ICT-based vocational education and training. Therefore a precise and effective ICT training tool for development, enhancement and boost of their transversal skills, is inevitably demanding.Fashion industries also need a flexible workforce that can respond to the development and the globalized market and the trend and need for internationalization. The workforce needs to be well qualified and ready to face the increased competition and rapid technological changes. To be compete in the global market fashion industries have to be smarter and able to adapt to changes. To achieve this, fashion industries need new education and training systems and tools for their existing and potential workforce in order to respond to the demands of the labour market and the global competition. In a framework of global competition, innovation and development are crucial elements to provide fresh impetus to a sustainable and competitive industry.In this context, the proposed project aims to design and develop an innovative and comprehensive training tool for export personnel of fashion industries, using ICT-based learning approaches and methodologies that will offer essential transversal skills for enabling them be ready to respond to international trade and market demands and enhancing the extroversion and the competitiveness of the industry as a whole. Bringing together the different sectors of fashion industries, the proposed tool will follow a comprehensive learner-centered approach based on acquired knowledge, skills and competences, in line with the European Qualification Framework (EQF). The objective of the proposed project is the design and implementation of an innovative and comprehensive training tool. Work-based training ICT tools in fashion industries are generally very outdated. They exist, but their availability is often not sufficient, the content is out-of-date and its distribution is not organised satisfactorily. Majority of present information materials regarding exports and global market information are at disposal only in paper form and most of them don’t cover modern trends, materials and fashion. Therefore, such a professional tool is considered extremely useful, since it helps to enhance the international extroversion of the sector especially for SME’s. The platform will focus on online training and will facilitate dissemination of knowledge and sharing of experience. Moreover, it will serve as a medium for all stakeholders in the field to share concerns and advice, as well as promote employment opportunities.The platform will respond to fashion marketing skills and for that scope will concentrate information and data regarding third countries market mechanisms and their function market’s technical requirements, recent trends of fashion marketing and expo’s evaluation in the global market, market’s development, development of the demand of sector’ s products, consumer’s behaviors and habits, trend analysis, demand chain, mechanisms for directs distribution of a product to international markets (by identifying customers;meeting their needs; implementing sales plans).