The second meeting of the ECVET-Lab project gathered once again representatives from all 7 organisations of the consortium in Nicosia (Cyprus) on the 20th, 21st and 22nd of June 2017. The event was organised by NIREAS – University of Cyprus with a twofold objective: first, the selection of 40 best practices of environmental management in laboratories; second, the review of completed tasks and achieved milestones, as well as the organisation of the work ahead for the upcoming 6 months.
During the workshop for the selection of 40 best practices, NOVOTEC, the University of Cyprus and ITeE-PIB presented the result of their respective focus groups celebrated in Spain, Cyprus and Poland during the precedent weeks. The results show the presence of more than 60 different examples along the categories suggested by the partnership, with many similarities and some divergences. NOVOTEC presented a methodology for the selection of the 40 best practices during the work session. At the end, the best practices were successfully identified.
Secondly, the partners presented the progress achieved along the tasks scheduled from the project start until June 2017, underlining the partners’ achievement in enrolling up to 35 laboratories that provided best practices from 9 European countries. The partnership has still 5 laboratories to enrol to achieve the foreseen objective, and the meeting was useful to reach commitments among partners to help each other achieving this objective.
The work ahead drove the rest of the ECVET-Lab partnership discussion. The most immediate task to be fulfilled will be the development of the Catalogue of Best Practices of Environmental Management in Labs, which is expected to be released early this autumn. NIREAS – University of Cyprus will draft contents and double-check with the rest of the partners, while Fundación Equipo Humano will design an attractive catalogue to be widespread to European labs.
In the same vein, the preparation of the Qualification Standard during the autumn was discussed. The project will deliver this result by the next partnership meeting that will be held in Radom, Poland by December 2017. Finally, the shape of the training course to be prepared in 2018 was sketched by MMC to the rest of the partners, who made contributions on the necessary adjustments that could be already foreseen at that early point.
Finally, partners discussed about the dissemination and communication actions to be carried out in the coming 6 months, notably addressed to spread the upcoming Catalogue of Best Practices among the European laboratories.
The second meeting concluded with cultural and team-building activities that contributed to smoothing cooperation and informal communication in the months to come.
