A passport to take energy efficiency building skills across borders
Buildings and homes are Europe’s single largest consumer of energy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that most of these buildings were built during the post-war construction boom. “Europe’s buildings aren’t only old, they’re grossly inefficient,” says Peter Gyuris, senior project manager at Geonardo. The good news is that these energy-inefficient homes can be made efficient through renovation. In fact, according to some estimates, doing so could save 45 % of the final energy consumption currently used to heat residential buildings. It’s because of figures like these that the EU launched its renovation wave initiative, which looks to renovate 35 million buildings by 2030. Unfortunately, doing so is easier said than done. “Energy-efficient and good quality home renovations require an advanced skillset from building professionals,” adds Gyuris. “While these skills are already in short supply, accessing those professionals who are properly trained is even more difficult.” As Gyuris explains it, one problem can be that if a building professional gets trained and certified in one country, that certification is often not recognised in another. “Before one can implement adequately performed energy-efficient renovations across the border, they would need to go through that country’s qualification and/or training scheme(s) – at the end of which they get the level of qualification they might already have,” he says. Cutting through this red tape is the EU-funded project TRAIN4SUSTAIN (Establishing Future-Oriented Training and Qualification Quality Standards for Fostering a Broad Uptake of Sustainable Energy Skills in the European Construction Sector). “Our goal was to establish a system of mutual recognition, one that would make it easier to have one’s accreditation accepted across all EU Member States,” notes Gyuris.
Proving equivalence with the Skills Passport
To do this, the consortium, led by Geonardo, analysed all available national qualification and training schemes. This process also included market-based and for-profit options. The outcome of this effort is the Skills Passport. “The Skills Passport is a tool designed to foster easy and practical comparison of skill levels among different professions on a transnational level,” remarks Gyuris. “It can be used to prove equivalence of qualification schemes within the EU or even with neighbouring states.”
The European Skills Registry and a new Competence Quality Standard
To makes the Skills Passport possible, TRAIN4SUSTAIN has improved the Competence Quality Standard (CQS), a catalogue of skills covering most competences relevant to energy performance in buildings, originally developed by the PROF-TRAC project. Any building professional can find his or her competences there, and select the level of competence possessed. In order to facilitate further uptake and standardisation, TRAIN4SUSTAIN validated the CQS through a CEN Workshop Agreement, a pre-standardisation step. This universal reference makes not only Skills Passports possible, but also the publication of a building professional’s certified competences in a single database: the European Skills Registry. “This is an easy-to-use, web-based platform for comparing and verifying professional qualifications,” says Gyuris. “It also serves a matchmaking function in that it can help connect qualified experts to energy-efficient building projects.” The European Skills Registry allows individual passports to be grouped in teams and companies, which is instrumental in proving competence in the context of larger projects. TRAIN4SUSTAIN has even tested the European Skills Registry in a public procurement procedure in Spain. “All of these outcomes make energy sustainability much more attractive to building professionals,” concludes Gyuris. “The more skilled professionals we have, the more buildings and homes we can renovate and the more energy we can save."
Keywords
TRAIN4SUSTAIN, buildings, energy, energy efficiency, renovation wave, building professionals, European Skills Registry, sustainability
