The Automotive Skills Alliance and European Battery Alliance Academy join forces to bridge growing skills gap across the mobility and battery supply chain
The Automotive Skills Alliance (ASA) and European Battery Alliance Academy backed by EIT InnoEnergy, the innovation engine for sustainable energy supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), an institution of the European Union have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding on a strategic partnership that will upskill and provide additional skills to the current mobility and battery industry to meet the demands of the growing sector.
It’s expected that the battery supply chain alone will require 4 million jobs by 2025 as the energy transition continues to accelerate, with 800K workers required to have access to additional training to meet demand. A collaborative and coordinated approach is necessary to ensure Europe takes a leading role in driving the transition as the sector dramatically increases in scale.
The MOU will connect the ASA, a large-scale partnership in the automotive-mobility ecosystem, under the European Skills Agenda Pact for Skills action, and EBAA, a platform by the industry and for the industry, aimed at deploying training courses based on the skills and needs of the sector in collaboration with training professionals in every country within the European Economic Area. This collaboration will create a single pan-European framework to enable upskilling and reskilling for the automotive labour force across the entire mobility sector and battery value chain. It will provide an independent platform to facilitate contacts between industry, education providers, regions, policy makers, and other relevant stakeholders to speed-up the green and digital transition.
Oana Penu at the EBAA comments: „This collaboration will give the added boost the rapidly growing European battery value chain requires to succeed. That’s why this agreement is so important today! Our industry-led approach will drive the needed education and training to ensure we provide our workers with the skills to manage the burgeoning demand of our energy transition. The ASA will add greatly to this mission, enabling us to accelerate the development of our European mobility industry.”
The strategic partnership will contribute to reaching the goals of the European Green Deal and reducing the carbon footprint of the mobility industry, while also empowering the European workforce within the framework of the Pact for Skills. Through cooperation, the partners can jointly reach various stakeholders to present the opportunities arising from the transformation and ensure that social and regional stakeholders can contribute to speeding up transition efforts.
Jakub Stolfa, ASA President, at the ASA added: „Successful transformation of the automotive-mobility ecosystem towards electrification requires massive and coordinated support of up- and re-skilling of the European workforce within the growing European Battery value-chain. The cooperation of the Automotive Skills Alliance and the European Battery Alliance Academy is a great and important step forward to address the skills needs and gaps, and to connect training opportunities to support of the developing European Battery industry. We are ready to jointly deliver tangible results, covering the entire ecosystem through this strategic partnership, from the industrial partners, education and training providers to regions all around Europe.”
The Memorandum of Understanding was signed on the 21s of November 2022 in Brussels as part of the event “Automotive regions at the crossroad: how can policy making and industry manage the transition?”. The ASA and EBAA believe their cooperation will enable them to leverage the unique strengths of each partner and thus contribute to managing the transition in automotive regions.
Click here to read the full Memorandum of Understanding, or download the printable pdf version of the press release here.
Source: https://automotive-skills-alliance.eu
Published by CVTI