Green Pulse — Polyphonic Up/reskilling for Living Skills Ecosystems
“To build a boat is not about weaving the sails, forging the nails, or reading the stars; to build a boat is about birthing a common desire for the sea in our hearts.”
HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-TRANSFO-07
“Most available research on the green transition focuses on macro-level policies, overlooking how workers and communities can drive change.”
— European Commission, Work Programme 2026
The problem TRANSFO-07 sets — and where the meso level fits
95%
of EU SMEs call having workers with the right skills important to their business model.
Flash Eurobarometer 529, 2023
39.5%
of adults trained at all last year — against the EU's target of 60% every year by 2030.
Eurostat Adult Education Survey, 2022
“no need”
is why 42.4% of adults neither train nor want to — for 75.9% of them the stated reason is simply that they see none.
Eurostat Adult Education Survey, 2022
In any given month the figure is lower still: 13.7% of 25–64-year-olds are in education or training of any kind. (Eurostat Labour Force Survey, 2025)
And the need is not marginal. For the twin transition Cedefop finds all occupations will need at least some up- or reskilling; about half of workers face a digital skills gap; and 27% are in “dead-end jobs” — more skilled than their work allows them to use. (Cedefop European Skills & Jobs Survey)
TRANSFO-07 itself notes that most research “focuses on macro-level policies, overlooking how workers and communities can drive change.” The two decades of EU competence frameworks — DigComp, EntreComp, LifeComp, and now GreenComp — describe competence at that macro level, as a taxonomy a worker is matched against. They are indispensable for comparison, but they are read against the meso level — sectors, workplaces, communities of practice — where the gap above actually lives and where the call asks for evidence.
GreenPulse’s contribution is to add that missing layer. Competence is treated not only as a structure a worker has but as an operation a worker does — captured in situ, in their own account, and only then mapped onto ESCO / GreenComp / DigComp as an output, never an input. Narrative, operation-first collection surfaces the variables large EU quantitative instruments (Cedefop’s skills survey, Skills-OVATE) cannot see on their own — then grounds and defines them, so the scale those instruments already have finally measures something real.
Outcome 1
Which competences workers need
Meso-level competence statements for the energy transition — what workers actually use, not what policy presumes.
Outcome 2
Actionable E&T & policy advice
Competence-pathway briefs and VET-curriculum updates, gender- and disability-inclusive, feeding the Union of Skills and Pact for Skills.
Outcome 3
Green ↔ digital interconnection
The twin-transition interface read where it is densest — grid-data literacy, AI-fluency and copilot workflows in energy operations.
The aim: an evidence apparatus that makes the competences of incumbent, young, disabled and marginalised workers legible where the taxonomies read only deficit. See the full call coverage.
Coordinated by
Conservatoire national des arts et métiers
Founded by decree of the Convention nationale, on Abbé Henri Grégoire’s proposal, to keep the arts and crafts — and teach them to working adults. GreenPulse builds on its unbroken 230-year record of evidence on industrial transition, competence and labour.
Why energy — single-sector focus
Cedefop demand-validated
Cedefop’s Skills in transition to 2035 places energy among the sectors most reshaped by Green-Deal skills demand.
Seven countries, four regime families
21 sites across statist (FR · BE · SE), liberal (UK), post-transition CEE and Baltic (PL · LV) and candidate (ME) skill-formation regimes — so a finding can be tested against the institutions that produced it, not just repeated.
Twin-transition spine
The green-digital interface is densest in energy: grid-data literacy, AI-fluency for renewables operations, copilot workflows on industrial software. Strongest ground for Outcome 3.
Narrative-evidence ancestry
The best-documented sector in the narrative-evidence literature: Moezzi · Janda · Rotmann (2017), Towers · Chabay · Okada (2022), Sleigh on carbon-economy decline, the Helgeson observatory family.
Nuclear arc — one competence, three directions of travel
Held as a contrast rather than a case. France builds a reactor pair at Gravelines while dismantling one at Fessenheim, under the same national skills plan. Belgium re-tasks teams recruited to decommission Doel back onto restart, after the phase-out law was repealed. Poland builds a first-of-a-kind at Choczewo with no domestic fleet to draw on. Three skill-formation regimes, one safety-critical, slow-clock competence the taxonomies capture poorly.
Lowest-risk, highest-citability single-sector choice for TRANSFO-07. Multi-sector scaling can follow.
The energy field in three moments — 21 sites, seven countries
I · Energy made
Acquire — Choczewo & Łeba (PL) · Kurzeme (LV) · Oostende (BE) · Norrbotten (SE) · Nikšić (ME)
II · Energy embodied
Relearn — Port Talbot (UK) · Lorraine (FR) · Västsverige (SE) · Inčukalns (LV)
III · Energy retired
Unlearn — Pljevlja (ME) · Konin (PL) · Fessenheim (FR) · Aberdeen & RMI retrofit (UK)
Site photography (cropped): Baltic offshore construction © Clangula, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Port Talbot blast furnace public domain · Pątnów, Konin © Jakub Maciejewski, CC BY-SA 4.0 — via Wikimedia Commons. Images illustrate each moment; not every named site is pictured.
Picking up where EU work left us
Cedefop · JRC · SkillsPULSE · BRIDGES 5.0 · the energy-citizenship cluster · the H2020 coal quartet — Europe has built an extraordinary quantitative baseline on green-transition skill demand. GreenPulse does not duplicate it. We carry it forward with what TRANSFO-07 explicitly asks for: identification of meso-level competence evidence, actionableE&T and policy guidance (including gender, disability and age-of-intervention dimensions), and operational green-digital competence integration.
EU research has built
What the baseline cannot see
Evidence × explanation × policy
The handoff in one sentence
SkillsPULSE measures what skill is missing. GreenPulse identifies the meso-level competence, explains why the gap reproduces, and delivers the policy briefs and curriculum updates that close it.
Three TRANSFO-07 outcomes, three operational answers — the Meso Competence Observatory (identification), the Policy Roadmap (E&T + policy translation), the Digital–Green Competence Matrix (green-digital). Both quantitative and qualitative methods sit inside the consortium. BRIDGES 5.0 (€4.6M, CL4) runs through CNAM, whose work package there was supervised from inside the GreenPulse team — finishing Dec 2026, so its results arrive as GreenPulse starts; SkillsPULSE reaches us as a clustering relation through its public deliverables, and the open-source ESCOX extractor built by the CL2 project SKILLAB comes to us already extended by GreenPulse from job-market text to narrative corpora. The handoff is not a promise. It is built into the consortium roster.
See the full clustering map for the ~30 EU projects GreenPulse webs into across 7 tiers.
Confirmed consortium
9 partners · 8 countries · 5 consortium roles
4 advisory / gap roles still open — see Partners.
Geographic footprint
Where the consortium reaches
Drag to pan · scroll / pinch to zoom · hover any partner country for detail
9 partners · 8 countries
🇪🇺EU member states
Future EU · accession 2028
Montenegro
ZOCG
🌐Associated / international
CNAM Centers · institutional reach of the coordinator
23 countries · 4 continents · Métropole + DROM-COM
Algérie · Bénin · Burkina Faso · Burundi · Cameroun · Chine · Côte d’Ivoire · Djibouti · France (Métropole + Guadeloupe · Martinique · Guyane · Réunion · Mayotte · Nouvelle-Calédonie · Polynésie française) · Gabon · Guinée · Liban · Madagascar · Mali · Maroc · Mauritanie · Niger · République centrafricaine · République du Congo · Sénégal · Togo · Tunisie
Coordinator’s teaching + partner-centre footprint. Distinct from the GreenPulse consortium partner countries above; shown to indicate scale of CNAM’s institutional reach.
