ISEKI will draft a first version of focus groups conduction guideline in M5.
To ensure that all skills needs are covered, partners will revise and complete the guidelines with their own field specific information as follow:
1. Agriculture & sustainability: UNITO, CONFAGRI, ICOS, AP, UHOH, GAIA, CONFAGRI PT, SCOOP, GZS, UCLM, AC3A, FENACORE, Plant ETP, PA, FJBLT
2. Food Industry and bio-economy: WUR, ISEKI, ICOS, AP, UHOH, CERTH, ACTIA, SCOOP, GZS, LVA, FIAB, SEVT, ANIA, FJ-BLT,
3. Certification, quality assessment and European harmonisation : AERES, INFOR, LLL-P, EFB, EFVET,
4. Digitalisation, Digital Technologies, Big data : UNITO, WUR, UHOH, CERTH, SCOOP, AC3A, FJ-BLT, EFB
5. Forestry: AP, CEPI
6. Water management: UCLM, FENACORE,
7. Soft skills: UNITO, CONFAGRI, INFOR, EFB,

The guidelines will be circulated to partners (ICOS, AP, UHOH, CERTH, ACTIA, SCOOP, AC3A, FDE, LLL-P (involvement of their pool of experts)) under the responsibility of ISEKI who will provide the finalised guideline in M6 in English.

The focus groups will aim at collecting qualitative data about skills in the agriculture, forestry and bio-economy sector. They will be conducted by inviting at least five different profiles involved in each focus group: education providers, advisors, farmers, foresters, agrifood companies, forest industries and cooperatives. The aim of the focus groups is to gather information and data about:
- Identified needs in agriculture and forestry. Needs will be classified into 4 main categories: sustainability, digitalisation, bio-economy and soft skills
- Industry needs (extrapolate skills needed in agriculture and forestry based also on industry needs)
- Existing training in response to identified needs, and missing training for the identified needs
- Identified target groups for the training and curricula definition
- Best methods to deliver trainings to each target groups

The involvement of the forestry, food industry, and paper industry and water management specialists is an added value to the project, allowing to directly address the whole value chain needs and responding to the CAP objective for agri food. It also address the concern of the “Strategic approach to EU agricultural research & innovation” to include the food and nonfood supply chain in the discussion and develops new business model for farmers tackling the lock-in effect the sector often face. Focus groups will bridge the industry (food, wood, fibre and bio-economy) with the farmers, foresters and education providers and provide an overview of the skills needs, skills gaps and training needs in the sector.
The whole value chain of the sectors (with a distinction between food, fodder and animals) will be represented ensuring an exhaustive vision of needs.

Once the guidelines ready (available in English only, and partner will apply it nationally directly), the following partners will organise national focus groups:
1. CONFAGRI with the help of UNITO in Italy
2. ICOS in Ireland.
3. FIAB with the help of UCLM, FENACORE and SCOOP in Spain
4. AERES with the help of WUR in Nederland
5. ISEKI with the help of AP and LVA, JF-BLT.
6. UHOH in Germany, with the help of the Farmers Federation, BLL and BVL
7. EFB with the help of GAIA, SEVT and CERTH .
8. ACTIA will organise a brainstorming session in France with ACTIA experts network. ANIA will organise a focus group in France, with the help of AC3A
9. GZS-ZKZP in Slovenia
10. CEPI will organize a focus group on forestry issues, and will participate to the one organised in Brussels.
11. One focus group will also be organised in Brussels with a more policy oriented focus with the involvement of EU umbrellas organisations: LLL-P, EfVET, ISEKI, FDE, COPA – COGECA RES WP and EIP-AGRI focus groups members.
Umbrella organisations (ISEKI, FDE, LLL-P, PlantETP, EfVET, CEPI, EFFAT and Copa Cogeca WP RES) will help each country to gather the five different profiles when they don’t cover the whole scope of stakeholders by reaching and directly engaging their networks.
EIP-AGRI focus groups will be contacted and used where appropriate to facilitate the organisation. UHOH will lead the contact and involvement of EIP-AGRI focus group.
All focus groups will be conducted between M6and M9 and recorded using high-quality microphone for analysis through IBM Watson Speech to text. The cloud service allows counting the occurence of keywords. The software will be brought and the analysis will be performed by ISEKI.

The outputs of this task will be combined in a deliverable
D1.4: Focus group guideline (M6) (ISEKI)
D1.5: Focus group analysis (M9) (ISEKI)