"con" Annex I: Spain
Annex to report: Vision on defencerelated skills for Europe today and
tomorrow

The past decade has seen a series of EU policy initiatives focusing on the role of skills as a key
ingredient of European defence industrial competitiveness and resilience in supplying the capabilities
needed for safeguarding Europe’s strategic interests and autonomy (see Figure 0.1). The skills
dimension has been progressively developed in successive policy documents, culminating in the
adoption of the European Defence Action Plan (EDAP) in 2016, which outlines the Commission’s
commitment to support the implementation of measures and initiatives to address defence industry
skills needs. In parallel, the Blueprint for Sectoral Cooperation on Skills, as part of the New Skills
Agenda for Europe, has focused on building a strategic framework for cooperation amongst key sector
stakeholders in order to address skills challenges across a range of industries. With defence selected
as one of the Blueprint pilot sectors, this current project supports the first phases of the pilot: namely,
the preliminary identification of skills gaps, challenges and shortages in the defence sector, the
drafting of a skills strategy for the sector, and the establishment of a European Defence Skills
Partnership (EDSP) to contribute to strategy development and implementation.