• Published on 18 May 2015
• External News

EuroTraining

Access to training in the areas of embedded systems, micro-/nanoelectronics and smart integrated systems

Annette Locher, FSRM, Switzerland

EuroTraining is a FP7 Coordination and Support Action with the aim of providing a European Training Infrastructure facilitating the provision of high calibre training across Europe. The service is available at www.eurotraining.net. It supports professional advancement training as well as academic training. Professional course providers get a central place for the presentation of their training offer while the curricula development in higher education is supported by a course material exchange service, summer schools, train-the-trainers courses and announcements of international graduate programmes available in the EU. The training action enhances the development of the European knowledge-based society in the fields of embedded systems, micro-/nanoelectronics and smart integrated systems.

The EuroTraining organisation has been around since 1995 with an extensive training offer targeting as well industrial as academic training in Europe. The key figures are:

• 78 professional course providers make use of EuroTraining for a pan European promotion of their courses. About 1 000 annual class-room courses are offered in 26 member states and additional 385 online courses are available
• 16 000 training users are subscribing to EuroTraining’s monthly newsletters. Approximately 40% are coming from industry
• A course accreditation system for professional advancement training ensuring high standards
• A training material brokerage service for EU universities with 160 university teaching modules
• Provision of new training roadmaps and overview of international graduate programmes

On a monthly basis EuroTraining scans the websites of all FP7/H2020/ECSEL projects to identify new publicly available courses on advanced subjects. During the last two years a total of 113 such new courses were identified and promoted on the EuroTraining web site. 20 000 users downloaded these course descriptions. Based on our past experience this additional promotion has doubled the number of potential participants on these courses and in certain cases even made it possible to run these courses.

EuroTraining is supporting European higher education with the organisation of 20 Train-the-Trainers courses. The aim is to transfer training experience from leading European universities to professors, PhDs and postdocs. More than 600 potential faculty members have achieved training and received training material in the most advanced subjects of micro-/nano technologies. www.eurotraining.net also gives access to free downloadable teaching materials (more than 160 teaching modules are available), links to more than 125 summer schools and links to European programs at master and PhD level with a focus on components and system design in the More-than-Moore domain and in the Beyond-CMOS domain.

The number of professional course providers subscribing to our service has during the last two years increased from 55 to 78. These Course Providers are distributed throughout the EU with the provision of courses in 26 out of the unions 28 member states. The Course Providers benefit from the additional promotion provided by EuroTraining. More than 16 000 users subscribe to our service generating an additional traffic to our Course Providers’ websites leading to approximately 3 000 additional course participants. Surveys carried out by EuroTraining indicate that the additional promotion of EuroTraining doubles the number of hits of the course description pages which in turn leads to additional registrations making it possible to run new innovative courses in areas that are still not mature enough seen from a commercial point of view.

The EuroTraining homepage makes it possible to specifically search for the training required. The search engine makes it possible to select ECTS or Quality Labelled courses only or to narrow down the search to e.g. only summer schools or training originating from Community funded projects.

Together with the traditional course brokerage with access to more than 1 000 annual courses, the above actions have turned EuroTraining into a unique one-stop service for EU based training in subjects related to embedded systems, micro-/nanoelectronics and smart integrated systems.

The training service can be accessed at www.eurotraining.net.

Contact:
Annette Locher, EuroTraining coordinator
FSRM Swiss Foundation for Research in Microtechnology
locher@fsrm.ch