Lifelong Learning in Textile Fibres for Textile Professionals

In the paste month of November took place the Kick-off Meeting of the eFibre Project – Lifelong Learning in Textile Fibres for Textile Professionals. The partners of this European project, funded by the Leonardo Da Vinci Program, are CITEVE (project coordinator), Tearfil and ATP from Portugal, AITEX from Spain and CENTEXBEL from Belgium.

In the last years were observed important developments in the textile fibres area, having been introduced in the market new fibres with special characteristics and properties, what made possible its use in multiple applications, such as technical textiles, functional and intelligent textiles and in prêt−à−porter applications.

The development of a product starts with the selection of the raw material, being this precept particularly important in products of higher added value because are the fibres properties that make the difference. So, the fibres’ domain are the main starting of a modern textile and clothing industry and able of winning the challenges that are approaching, namely the ones of the competitiveness. The advantages of the fibres’ knowledge start in the selection of the fibrous raw material most suitable for the quality and final use that is intended to give to the textile product that is pretended to develop, and that contributes decisively in order that the final product reaches the maximum level of performance.

The project main idea is to offer e-Learning training courses on textile fibres, either at national and international level. The interest of this work covers horizontally all the sub sectors of the textile and clothing chain, like spinning companies, weaving and knitting companies, dyeing, finishing and printing companies and garment companies.The general goals of this project are:

• The improvement of the training level in textile fibres of the textile and clothing industry workers, namely in new fibres, properties, applications and their conservation and cleanliness;
• Compiling information, that is now very diversified in books, magazines, standards, scientifique articles, among others, in a single tool, what allows to guarantee an easy access to the information, namely to workers with fewer resources and/or with a low scholarity level;
• Combat the lack at technical level in workers responsible for companies’ planning regarding the fibres use and/or fibres’ mixture that provide a higher trust guarantee to the product that is pretended to conceive;
• Combat the lack at technical level in textile industry technicians and, consequently, to diminish the probability of existing defects in textile manufacture.

The expected results of the project are the following:

• A training course, with two levels of learning (Level 1 for low level qualification and Level 2 for high level qualification), that will be conceived and developed with the active participation of the Textile and Clothing Industry professionals;
• A Community of Practice that will serve as support to the training action, although it is pretended to be a privileged meeting point for all the Textile and Clothing Sector agents, where it can be founded the technical and technological information more updated about the textile fibres;
• A research tool, that will have the behavior of a search engine, with the possibility of crossing and data refinement; and that information will come from all the Community members, that want to share pertinent and updated information, so as of the constituent institutions of the partnership; this tool may be faced as a Knowledge Management tool, because many of the tacit knowledge of the Textile and Clothing Sector’s professionals will become explicit in the tool;
• Because the project will be done in cooperation with two European institutes (AITEX (Spain), CENTEXBEL (Belgium) and one Company Association – ATP (Portugal), the training action will be available in the following languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French and in English.