Project Kick-off Meeting

The new project funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) which is titled “Empowering the European Workforce Development through Online/Virtual Skills Training for Digital Transformation towards mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Situations” (SkoPS) has been developed to promote the skills of engineers and workforce in the domain of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as an influencing and emerging technologies in industries. The SkoPS started on June 2021 for a period of two years. Within the scope of this project, ten online accessible course modules (Intellectual Outputs – IO) will be developed or revised based on the existing course materials at the partner institutions and five transnational meetings including a kick-off meeting, project annual progress report meeting, project training material evaluation meeting, project closure, and final report meeting are planned. The consortium of the SkoPS project consists of four organizations, Petanux GmbH (PTX) and University of Siegen (USI) in Germany, University of Alicante (UA) in Spain, and European Institute for Local Development (EILD) in Greece and the University of Siegen is the coordinating institution. The Kick-off Meeting (KoM) of the SkoPS project was held on June 4 th and 11 th 2021. On the first day, each partner presented their organizations, team members, and their experiences in similar projects. In this meeting, the Project Management Board (PMB) members were chosen and the frequency of each PMB meeting was discussed. The PMB meetings were set for the first Thursday of each month to discuss the project status, progress, follow-ups, and important decisions. The project proposal description, main objectives, activities, milestones, and implementation strategies were reviewed and all tasks and activities were planned and allocated to each partner fairly according to their competencies and experiences. Further, motivations, expected results, and risk management of the project were the other cores of discussions during the KoM. In the SkoPS project, project activities are classified in some workpackages (WPs), and each partner is responsible for one WP. The main activities include preparation of the project, project management, dissemination and sustainability, educational events, and quality control and monitoring. On the second day of the KoM, the WPs, IOs, and their main objectives by each partner were introduced and the course descriptions were explained briefly by each responsible partner. Some important points such as communication tools, project mailing list, document sharing platform SharePoint, E-platform, and project website and the project domain and hosting were discussed. All the project-related information is available online via “SkoPS.eu”. The design of the project logo, flyer, and the poster was assigned to EILD based on their expertise.