Welcome to PROF/TRAC’s fifth newsletter with essentials on nZEB training

This is a bi-annual newsletter with updated news on Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB) from around Europe in the framework of the Horizon 2020 project PROF/TRAC. The project will finish at the end of February with a conference in Brussels on 20 February.

What is PROF/TRAC?

PROF/TRAC is a 3-year EU funded project with 15 partners from eight EU countries, which started in March 2015. The PROF/TRAC team develops a European training and qualification scheme for technical experts, architects, engineers and building managers involved in nZEB design, construction and maintenance.
Visit www.proftrac.eu for more information and watch our training sessions on nZEB as webinars online on YouTube.
If you are a training provider and you would like to join our CPD scheme - please contact us.

Invitation to the Final PROF/TRAC Conference in Brussels on 20 February 2018: European Multi-level Skills offensive – The key to assuring public support for the Energy Transition

In its Blueprint for Sectorial Cooperation on skills, the EU identifies construction as a sector with high awareness of the importance of skills with focus areas including energy efficiency and digitisation. EU Funding and financing are key instruments to achieve the energy transition in the buildings sector. The offer of job creation and better quality of life in our homes, cities and neighbourhoods will be central in gaining political support for the transition. This one-day conference, organised by project partner Housing Europe, will give vital pointers and concrete examples on how these EU instruments can help ensure this vital public support for the energy transition.

The PROF/TRAC team have identified the skills gap among NZEB professionals and are addressing this gap with courses and dissemination of material. This final PROF/TRAC conference, to be held in Brussels on February 20th, will broaden the perspective to address awareness, skills and confidence gaps along the construction supply chain, within our administrations and amongst our citizens, which continue to slow the demand and speed of renovation roll-out across the region. We will also consider the EU strategy to address this gap with a focus on European Structural and Investment Funds and the skills Agenda, now in the post 2020 program period, which is under preparation.

Share your training material on nZEBs with the PROF/TRAC community

PROF/TRAC consortium has recently opened its Training Material Repository to any expert, organization, or project consortium willing to share their training materials on nZEBs with the wide PROF/TRAC community. Upload yours here!

 The PROF/TRAC repository already offers the whole IDES-EDU educational package and a number of presentations, reports, guidelines, etc. collected from relevant European funded projects and studies. By widening the offer of nZEB-related training materials, PROF/TRAC repository will further strengthen its position as a reference point for professionals willing to bridge the skills gap in nZEB construction.

The strength of the repository is not only in being a nZEB reference point, but also in the fact that all resources are stored in the PROF/TRAC library and are therefore directly accessible from the repository. This feature ensures that no recourses are lost or inaccessible due to expired projects or changed web-domains. The repository provides an easy and swift access to a wide range of resources with specific topics within the nZEB design, construction, operation and maintenance. Thereby it reduces significantly the efforts needed to allocate specific resources in the vast number of publications available.

A PROF/TRAC BUILD UP webinar addressing the professional skills gap

On 21 November, PROF/TRAC offered a BUILD UP webinar about “Interdisciplinary skills development of building professionals on nZEB construction”. The webinar focused on the skills required by the building industry middle and senior level professionals, and on how to address the skills gap through Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses. Invited speakers displayed the expertise they developed by organizing or attending such courses, with special attention to the market appreciation for the skills acquired by participants. The recording of the webinar will soon be available on the BUILD UP portal.

PROF/TRAC trained more than 80 trainers successfully

An important part of the PROF/TRAC project was the series of Train-the-Trainers (TtT) courses. The aim of the course for future trainers is to not only become familiar with the issues of nZEBs, but also learn about modern teaching methods, skills mapping, and how to create lifelong learning courses for different target groups of building experts. In addition to attending lectures, TtT participants prepare their own course for their organisation/country. After meeting all the requirements, participants receive a certificate of successful graduation and are listed in the PROF/TRAC list of trainers.

After the three face-to-face courses that took place in Prague (CZ), Zagreb (HR) and Valencia (ES), the remaining two courses were organized in form of webinars. Face-to-face TtT courses took place over two days with lectures and seminars, where the participants worked under the guidance of experts in small national teams. The webinars required a different methodical approach. Thus the 4th and 5th PROF/TRAC TtT were organized as a series of eight short online sessions over the course of three weeks. Within each session, a short version of the lecture was presented live, accompanied by study material. The entire ‘long’ version of the lectures are available on the PROF/TRAC YouTube channel. At the end of the session, participants had the opportunity to discuss and access their off-line record. The acquired knowledge was verified by a short online self-test after each session. Final papers were handed over to the lecturer in electronic form.

The PROF/TRAC online seminar was attended by a total of 183 participants from 36 countries around the world, contributing to the snowball effect of spreading the idea of the PROF/TRAC project.

PROF/TRAC partner Atecyr promotes PROF/TRAC in Spain

During the last three months, Atecyr has organized a series of conferences about nZEB in several cities of Spain, such as Madrid, Valencia, Gijón, Bilbao, Zaragoza and Barcelona. These seminars are aimed to give practical solutions to the HVAC's experts. More than 500 people attended to the different speakers, all of them architects, engineers, and companies linked to the sector. At the end of every conference, there were several debates about different related topics; for instance, the integration of renewable energies in nEZB and their efficiency compared to conventional systems; or how to incorporate this kind of buildings into the Spanish legislation. In all these conferences, a speaker from Atecyr, explained the PROF TRAC project to the audience, showing its achievements and the future steps to come.

Slovakia: A new EU country joins PROF/TRAC

Slovak Society of Environmental Engineering (SSTP) invited to a PROF/TRAC training in Senec in November, to which 55 engineers, building managers and members of municipality bodies came (41men/ 14women). The organisers appreciated mainly the various materials obtained during the Train the Trainers that were made freely available so that they could implement the materials in their presentations. The course organisers considered the courses successful, because they identified a potential to educate the attendees regarding nZEBs and considerably improved the knowledge of the attendees in this field.

One of the organiser stated: ‘Before the course, the participants had only little information regarding nearly zero energy buildings. They knew energy certification is mandatory for new buildings and for existing buildings after a major retrofit, but most of them did not relate the process of energy certification to the nearly zero energy building standard. In this sense the attendees were provided with a good amount of new information related to different aspects of nZEBs, which will help them make informed decisions in the future. The attendees appreciated the variety of information given to them regarding nZEB. The feedback regarding the form and duration of the course was generally positive, as it was just enough to cover all the topics and simultaneously not taking too much of the attendees´ precious working time. Some of the attendees particularly appreciated the participation of the various professional organizations that helped organize the course, and also the possibility to discuss the different aspects of nZEB with experts.’

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 649473.