Drawing on two "Future Skills" survey rounds coordinated across all six sub-sectors, the project found that over half of respondents flagged urgent training gaps in circular economy practices and cybersecurity, two areas increasingly central to how chemical companies operate but historically underrepresented in vocational and continuing education. Around 40% of respondents reported offering no training at all in these areas, suggesting the gap is not simply one of quality but of basic availability across large parts of the sector.

To translate these findings into something usable, the project built a shared competence matrix covering 118 identified trends grouped into cross-cutting megatrends and 242 mapped skills, including 24 skills newly added to the EU's ESCO occupational classification system and a further 71 linked to existing ESCO entries. It has also validated six new occupational profiles, each backed by a dedicated skill card translating the underlying megatrend into a concrete job description: an Eco-Design Engineer and Life Cycle Assessment Analyst for plastics, an Analytics Translator for consumer chemicals, a Methods Modeller and Future Farmer for fertilisers, a Waste Management Officer for rubber, a Sustainable Process Development Chemist for pharmaceuticals, and an SSbD Products Manager and Sustainable Products Sales Manager for petrochemicals.

Of 22 new training modules planned as of August 2025, four have already been uploaded to the project's online learning platform, alongside 32 existing training programmes mapped within the consortium, giving companies and training providers a first, if still partial, inventory of what already exists versus what still needs to be built. Running until 2027 with over 30 partners across the six sub-sectors, the initiative's next phase shifts from mapping and design toward piloting and scaling this training pipeline, with the explicit goal of turning scenario work into actionable recommendations that companies, educators and policymakers can use to prepare Europe's chemical workforce for a more sustainable, more digital future.

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