About the Project

Erasmus +
Key Action 2: Strategic Partnerships for Vocational Education and Training
2018-1-FI01-KA202-047210
1.9.2018 – 31.12.2020

LEAN FOR WORK AND LEAN FOR LIFE

Train the Trainer to Teach Lean Skills in VET is a two-year cross-sectoral development project aiming at developing teachers’ and trainers’ skills in vocational education and training (VET) to better guide their colleagues and students in Lean skills in innovative ways – to train the trainer. The training approach aims at being interactive, experimental and inclusive.

Within the project, there are four VET partners and one research and development institute in Finland, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, all working with Lean in their organisations. The partners’ Lean work has been carried out together with organisations in the industry and some of the working life partners function as associated partners in this project.

This strategic partnership has developed and produced innovative approaches to professional development of VET trainers’ Lean skills in order to train students for working life. Our aim is to provide all students with valuable Lean skills by the time they graduate.

The objectives:

  • To build up teachers’ and trainers’ capacity and confidence in teaching Lean skills in innovative ways to colleagues and students
  • To provide sustainable professional development to disseminate the expertise of the partners across the partnership and encourage synergy between different VET disciplines, organisations and countries.
  • To increase the organisations’ Lean development capacity and cooperation with working life.
  • To develop key competences of lifelong learning for the participating teachers, to spread the knowledge and use of digital skills and to increase each organisations capacity to cooperate on an international level.

About Lean

Lean is an improvement and problem solving methodology that strives to reduce or eliminate activities that do not add value to the customer. Lean is a never-ending elimination of waste; it is committed to total customer satisfaction, total commitment to quality and total management and employee involvement. Although Lean’s origins are in the Japanese car industry, thousands of businesses worldwide in all industries and services, including healthcare and governments, are using Lean principles as the way to think and work. Lean skills are applicable to all kinds of organisations, be it profit or non-profit, industrial or service, private or public, big or small – as well as to any type of function within the organisation.

Project outputs:

A high quality training package including four intellectual outputs that are piloted by the project partners.

  1. Basic Lean theory training package – What is Lean? Why Lean?
  2. High quality toolbox with Lean group exercises.
  3. Digital environment with individual Lean exercises.
  4. Teacher/trainer instruction manual on how to deliver the course.

The material has been produced in English, Finnish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. Project information and all outputs are found on this website.