CTCP is a private, non-profit organization, founded in 1986, with 483 private companies as members. CTCP employs 43 technicians, engineers and senior specialists and trainers and workswithapproximately15externalconsultants/trainers in a regular basis. CTCP’s headquarters are placed near Porto (2nd biggest city in Portugal) in S. João da Madeira which is one of the two largest industrial area of Footwear in Portugal. CTCP aims at supporting all companies of Footwear cluster which is represented by more than 1500 SMEs from shoe industry, 300 SMEs from components industry, and 307 of leather goods industry, and small entrepreneurs in the field of design and project engineering, all related to Footwear.

The most relevant CTCP’s activities are: Quality Control, Consultancy, Training, Marketing and Promotion, Research and Development, Health& Safety, Environment, Business Intelligence, Studies and comparative Research. In the field of training/ employment CTCP offers vocational and non-vocational training through classical training, work based learning, training-action, blearning, among other models and services; CTCP is certified for providing Training by the Portuguese Government, and promotes more than 5.000 training hours per year, targeted to a universe of more than 1500 employees in the footwear sector, since the diagnosis till the evaluation. In the past 5 years CTCP worked directly with more than 200 companies, involving more than 12.000 employees which represents more than1/3ofthe global Employment in Portuguese Footwear Industry.

CTCP recently launched a FAB-LAB aiming at supporting designers and other technicians to materialize their ideas and produce their prototypes. The FAB-LAB provides facilities (all necessary equipment to design, develop and produce footwear and leather goods prototypes) and technical support in terms of staff. In addition it has an agenda of workshops and seminars to continue developing skills in this fields.

In addition, CTCP has a wide experience in promoting, coordinating and collaborating with innovative projects, at national and international level in the field of Research and Development, Business Intelligence and Training/Employment. In the field of studies and research CTCP promoted and coordinated the studies “The use of training by Footwear companies in the promotion of competitiveness” (2004), “Innovative Methodology of Diagnosis of training needs based in a model of segments” (2006), “New skills for Footwear” (2008), and coordinated and produced a collection of 15 survival manuals for entrepreneurs namely Social Corporate Responsibility, Financial Control in SMEs, Product Budgeting, among others. CTCP also participates regularly with APICCAPS (Footwear association) in the definition of policies and strategies for Footwear, namely in the study “Footure 2015” and more recently Footure 2020 (Strategic Plan for the Footwear sector 2014-2020) where Innovation in Design constitutes one of the most important goal. CTCP coordinated and participated in two big projects at national level in the frame of Social Corporate Responsibility and Business Intelligence.

CTCP participates in European Commission ESCO Project (European Skills and Competences) being part of the Reference Group of Textile, Clothing, Leather, Footwear and related products. CTCP is also member Fashion Industries‘ Skills Council (national level) which involves cloths, textile, leather, footwear, leather goods sectors.

In the field of training: CTCP’s specialty goes from the diagnosis of training needs, design of development plans/projects, training development and accompanying and evaluating. CTCP is expert in work based training, classical training and b-learning for what it developed it shown e-learning platform (www.gialearn.com) made by internal informatics steam, which is very known and used by Footwear sector in Portugal. CTCP uses mainly practical and tailor-made approaches in its training projects, in order to cover all the stages of Foot wear companies and employees. Concerning training areas, CTCP developed expertise in many fields such as Quality,

Productivity, Organization and Methods, Management, Technical Foreign Languages with vocational orientation to Footwear, HSW, Environment, Foot wear technical contents, etc. CTCP as a wide experience in producing technical pedagogical material, namely manuals, presentations for web, videos, etc.