During the last six years, the European Social Fund has been an important instrument in supporting politicies aimed at improving and developing civil protection competences. In collaboration with EFESO, numerous vocational training courses and system activities have been undertaken.

The collaboration was established in 2001 with a first plan, and continued until 2005 with increasingly effective plans not only in their structure, but in the way that they adopted the Civil Protection aim which EFESO has endeavoured to pursue.

The will to form a vocational training “culture” has led to the development of the ability :

• to analyze requirements,
• to translate these requirements into standardized courses,
• to certify the standards of the vocational training courses mainly attended by volunteers,
• to recognize entry credits,
• and to structure ideal insertion courses for the new volunteers.

This collaboration saw the involvement of the entire voluntary Civil Protection Service, covering all the provincial territories, but it should be pointed out that the will to create a Civil Protection vocational training system has always been strong. In spite of the progress made, work still remains to be done and the volunteers are pursuing their actions with other instruments and means. In the last few years, volunteers have been able to benefit from many permanent vocational training courses in order to improve their ability to react and to organize their teams in the face of any kind of emergency that may strike the region.

During these years the aim has been twofold : to maintain the volunteers’ high level of competence and at the same time to build, step by step, an accepted, homogeneous system that could be a further guarantee of the excellent work that the volunteers already carry out.