Enhancing the training capacity of the wood and furniture competence centre TSENTER in order to increase the competitiveness of the wood and furniture industry SMEs.

Challenging times are dictating SMEs to find new innovative ways to keep the edge over the competition. In order to stay in front, it’s necessary to have the industry’s leading trends well mapped and the know-how close-by. Modernized equipment and production processes in the wood and furniture industry are also causing changes in educational field; schools must constantly update their curricula to prepare better workforce for the industries. Võrumaa Vocational Training Centre (educational instance) and it's unit TSENTER - The Centre of Competence for Wood Processing and Furniture Manufacturing, will in cooperation with Furniture Cluster of South-East Estonia support SMEs in product process development and marketing through special training programs. The overall objective is to provide better training conditions for SMEs in the wood sector, enabling them to acquire the necessary knowledge for the introduction of new technology, therefore enabling them to innovate and thus move up the value chain.  TSENTER - The Centre of Competence for Wood Processing and Furniture Manufacturing has a well-established network and experienced, qualified personnel to develop training programs for the wood and furniture sector SMEs. For the purpose of providing innovative methodologies of teaching and to expand the training target groups, TSENTER lacks modern, high-quality equipment to implement new programs. The project helps to raise the training capacity of the TSENTER to the new heights, which also furthermore gives educational benefits to Võrumaa Vocational Training Centre in general. The purchased equipment and developed programs will provide new ways of teaching and also creating workspace for the production of promotional material, thus increasing the innovation capacity and competitivness of wood and furniture industry SMEs. TSENTER's planned investments and developed programs will give the institution a starting platform for continuing newly incorporated trainings even after the project concludes. The wood and furniture industries SMEs are the main target group. The training is intended for specialists in the wood and furniture industry sector and for people sent for training by the Unemployment Insurance Fund. Programs are developed, taking into consideration the special interests of women and special needs of disabled people. Main outputs are: 1. New equipment and tools purchased. 2. Two training programs developed. 3. Conducted 10 training sessions, using new equipment. The main activities and their contribution to achieve project objectives and results are: 1. The procurement of equipment and tools ensures that teachers have modern tools to conduct high quality training and equipped studio for product promotion for students and SMEs. 2. Development of training programs makes it possible to deal with different target groups in a targeted manner and to teach them new skills using new equipment. 3. Organizing 10 training courses. The purpose of organising training days is to introduce new equipment to specialists and also beginners in the wood and furniture sector SMEs.

Specific objective is to provide new ways of teaching via purchase of modern equipment and developed new training programmes, thus increasing the innovation capacity of furniture industry SMEs. Project main results are: 1. New equipment and tools purchased. 2. Two training programmes developed. 3. Conducted 10 training sessions, using new equipment. Equipnemt and tools are used for creating a studio environment and learning/ testing environment for SMEs and start-ups. Studio environment is created to promote marketing abilities by better ways to capture the products of SMEs; offering the readiness to convert the results over to virtual reality. Implementing the first VR based training-programme for wood and furniture industries; providing basically wasteless learning methods. With the help of professional tools, that are used by wood and furniture SMEs, developing sophisticated training programmes, that will also incorporate specific needs of disabled people and interests of women. Project results link to the following programme result indicators: 1) Increasing SME competitiveness and entrepreneurship by fostering cooperation between the public, private and R&D sectors 2) Number of organisations using programme support for cooperation in education, R&D, and innovation. TSENTER is R&D organisation and our partner - Cluster of furniture enterprises - involves 31 SMEs. As a result of the project, TSENTER will increase it's capacity to provide to SMEs knowledge, skills, and best practices in materials and technologies to advance production, management, and product development in wood processing and furniture manufacturing. Number of SMEs and start-ups benefiting from new programmes and training courses developed in this project, is at least 10.