8th Skills4Retail Alliance Meeting: Turning the Pilot into a Legacy

From pilots to lasting impact: how the 8th Alliance Meeting set out the next chapter for retail skills in Europe

With the Emerging Training Programme now being delivered in classrooms and workplaces across eight European countries, the Skills4Retail Alliance used its 8th meeting on 7 May 2026 to shift gears. Less stocktaking, more strategy.

Hosted by Business Development Coordinator Nicole Bartolo, the conversation revolved around one underlying question: how do we make sure that what Skills4Retail is building does not stop when the project does?

Three threads ran through the agenda — the state of play on the pilot, a concrete follow-up pipeline presented by OTB International, and the wider European skills agenda for retail as seen from inside the EU institutions. Together, they painted a picture of a project entering its most outward-looking phase.

Where the Emerging Training Programme stands today

The opening update revisited Work Package 4, the pilot implementation of the Emerging Training Programme co-developed by the University of Bucharest and Skillnet Ireland. After nearly two years of curriculum design, the focus is now on getting real learners into the modules — students and jobseekers stepping into retail for the first time, and experienced staff moving towards leadership and digital transformation roles.

Across the eight pilot countries, the same operational question kept coming back to the table: how to deepen the involvement of retailers themselves. The next phase of work will lean heavily on work-based learning — internships, job shadowing days, mentoring, and short employer-led learning sequences — and partners were invited to come forward with concrete openings inside their own organisations.
To make that easier, Skills4Retail is moving away from broad calls for participation and towards one-to-one conversations with interested retailers, designed around what each company can realistically offer and what it stands to gain.

OTB International maps the road beyond Skills4Retail 

A large part of the meeting was devoted to a strategic intervention from OTB International (Out of the Box) — the European Network for Social Innovation that holds AISBL status in Belgium and runs operations from offices in Brussels and Faro.
OTB is not a newcomer to the consortium; it is the Skills4Retail partner under Priority IV: Cross-Cutting, contributing to dissemination and cross-sectoral collaboration. What was new at this meeting was the scale of what comes next.

A few numbers framed the conversation. OTB connects 36 member organisations across 26 European countries, runs 27 active projects with a team of seven, and closed 2025 with 67 events, 1,452 direct participants, 23 publications, 19 policy events and an online reach of around 160,000 people.

Its work sits across four strategic priorities — Alternative Democracies, Fresh Ideas for Social Cohesion, Mental Health & Happiness, and Cross-Cutting Youth Priorities (AI, sustainability, social entrepreneurship, skills for life). It leans on a familiar toolkit: communities of practice, innovative education tools, cross-sectoral cooperation, and active citizen participation.

Three Tracks for Future VET Funding

The real headline, though, was the three-track follow-up strategy that OTB Europe is putting in place to keep the Skills4Retail outcomes alive after the project closes:

• Track 1: A KA220-VET Cooperation Partnership. Submitted through the Hungarian National Agency and built directly on the Skills4Retail curricula, this would extend the Retail Skills Strategy into national VET systems. It involves 3–4 European partners with a clear focus on digital and green retail competences for SME staff and VET learners.
• Track 2: A Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) consortium. This more ambitious track (under ERASMUS-EDU-2026-PEX-COVE) involves a minimum of 8 partners from at least 4 EU countries. It designed to align VET institutions, retail employers, and research partners with the Union of Skills and the EU’s retail industrial strategy.
• Track 3: National-Level KA220-VET Projects. Running alongside the others, 3-4 smaller national project are being scoped for the 2026 Round 1 and Round 2 calls in Portugal, Hungary, Romania and Belgium. Each tackling a specific slice of the agenda: e-commerce skills, green retail practices, resilience competences, and VET teacher training.

Beyond project applications, OTB invited Alliance members to make use of the network’s wider services, including Study and Advocacy Visits to Brussels, EU Policy Reviews, the bi-annual EU Funding Guide, and the European Project Accelerator.

 The pitch was practical: any Alliance member with a retail-skills idea that fits one of these calls should get in touch. The session closed with a short quiz on OTB’s priorities, methods, and projects — a deliberately light moment that also doubled as a reminder of which calls and instruments are actually on the table for 2026.

Plugging into the European skills agenda: the Large Skills Partnership

The third strand of the meeting widened the lens beyond Skills4Retail itself. Annika Flaten, Director of Commerce at UNI Europa, walked partners through the work of the Large Skills Partnership (LSP) for the retail and wholesale ecosystem — the commerce-sector vehicle of the EU’s Pact for Skills, launched as part of the European Skills Agenda.

Of the fourteen industrial ecosystems identified by the Commission for the Pact, commerce is the largest by employment but hosts one of the smallest LSPs. Growing it matters for everyone working on European retail skills — including Skills4Retail, whose consortium already overlaps significantly with the LSP membership.

Both initiatives are pulling in the same direction: promoting equal opportunities, improving the attractiveness of retail careers, and addressing the structural skills mismatches in the sector.

The most concrete piece of news was the next LSP webinar, scheduled for 11 June 2026 from 3:00 to 4:30 pm CET. It features Dr. Oran Doherty, Head of Retail Ireland Skillnet, discussing the future of skills needs in retail: workplace trends, the employee experience, the changing role of managers, and the competences that define a modern retail workplace. Two further webinars are planned for 2026, focusing on equality and inclusion.

Alliance members were warmly invited to attend, to apply for LSP membership, and put themselves forward as speakers for upcoming sessions.