"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."