The Eugenides Foundation’s core strategy is to contribute to the scientific and technical education of young people with the aim of producing well-trained professionals in the technical field. We actively support technical and vocational education because we believe that a country’s sustainable development is based not only on academic excellence, but also on the strength of applied skills.
Skills development is currently one of the most significant challenges facing the Greek economy. Technological advancements, the digital and green transitions are constantly changing the needs of the labor market, making a more flexible and effective training system necessary. The main problem is not only the shortage of workers, but primarily the mismatch between the skills that workers possess and those that businesses need. For this reason, training programs must be designed based on actual production needs, through close collaboration with businesses and the use of reliable labor market data.
It was with this philosophy in mind that the Eugenides Foundation’s Training Institute was established. Its goal is to serve as a bridge between education and the workforce. The programs are designed in collaboration with businesses, which actively participate in identifying the required skills, while the goal is to provide free training through contributions from businesses on the one hand and grants and scholarships from the Foundation on the other. In this way, trainees are immediately placed in jobs, while at the same time existing skills gaps in the economy are filled.
Our work in the field of technical skills in recent years has revealed that there are gaps in identifying the required technical skills, for which training must be promoted immediately.
We considered it our duty to help identify these skills by geographic region in Greece, information that was not available at the desired practical level. This led to our official institutional collaboration with the team of experts from the Ministry of Labor’s MEKY, utilizing its required data and models. In collaboration with the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and the MEKY consultant, a model for identifying the required technical skills was implemented in a pilot study in the prefectures of Evros and Rodopi, the results of which were evaluated through on-site interviews and deemed highly satisfactory. We have thus created an effective tool that, taking into account the necessary local adjustments, can identify the skills that are most in demand for any given geographic area.