Future Skills: From Model to Meaning
Early Reflections on Translating a Future‑Skills Framework into European Curricula

When we first set out to pilot the TRIComp framework in three very different learning contexts – an Italian “ITS” higher‑VET programme in Mechatronics, a French Campus des Métiers & des Qualifications pathway on Industrial Automation, and selected engineering modules at the Universitat Politècnica de València – our agenda looked technical: align learning outcomes, map modules, issue badges. Yet only a few months into the collaborative design process it became clear that the most interesting story unfolds one level deeper: how an abstract competence architecture begins to live inside teachers’ choices, students’ reflections and institutional negotiations.

Below I sketch four early, and decidedly human‑centred, conclusions. I anchor them in the four dimensions of Future‑Skills Literacy (knowledge, experience, creativity, critical reflection) that we formulated in our 2024 white‑paper , and illustrate them with glimpses from the TRIComp research report and the pilot proposals.

Embedding Future Skills: 4 Lessons

1 Epistemic Clarity: turning a wheel of 22 competences into shared language

The TRIComp visual wheel of 22 validated competences across Innovation, Management, Green Transformation and Digital domains looks deceptively simple in the report (see Figure 15 here: https://hucolabs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/D2.1-Future-Skills-for-Applied-Innovation-in-Technical-Professions.pdf) . In practice, knowing what each label means for day‑to‑day teaching was our first collective exercise in literacy. Italian colleagues, accustomed to ministerial descriptors such as “Tecnico Superiore per l’Automazione”, initially read “Creative Problem‑Solving Competence” as a soft skill; Valencian engineers associated it with design‑thinking software. Weekly glossary sessions slowly produced a glocalised lexicon: statements short enough for badges, precise enough for assessment rubrics. The process reminded us that competence models only gain validity when communities appropriate their wording – a point already stressed in the TRIComp methodological reflection .

TriComp Framework

2 Embodied Experimentation in Action – The Grand Challenge as a Living Laboratory for Future‑Skills Literacy

Every autumn the NextEducation “Grand Challenge” transforms our teaching project into a temporary micro‑society.30 students—drawn from business information sciences courses —develop their own authentic project briefs. Within twelve feverish weeks they must diagnose the problem, prototype a solution and defend their work at a public student‑led conference. No professor can pre‑script the sequence of discoveries, detours and dead‑ends they will encounter; instead we curate a space of possibilityand let complexity do the teaching.

On paper the Grand Challenge “seminar” still contains tidy learning outcomes. Yet the first unexpected event, a cracked sensor housing, the first budget mis‑calculation or the sudden no‑show of a interview partners blows any notion of linear instruction apart. Students are compelled to act with their whole bodies and emotions: align protocols under time‑pressure, placate a frustrated interview candidate, translate jargon across disciplines. Such moments echo the TRIComp findings that true competence only emerges when knowledge, skills and attitudes are forced into concert by messy reality.

We repeatedly observe that the transversal competence FS‑13 Self & Time Management becomes the tacit glue that allows teams to keep momentum amidst chaos. Learners move from naïve checklist planning to a reflective choreography of sprints, pauses and renegotiated milestones—exactly the evaluative level foreseen for FS‑13 in the TRIComp framework . Its prominence in student diaries corroborates the project’s empirical insight that autonomy and pacing are not “nice‑to‑have” add‑ons but structural pre‑conditions of innovation‑ready practice.

3 Experience as design principle: choreographing uncertainty

Designing the Grand Challenge therefore means orchestrating uncertainty rather than eliminating it. We start with deliberately under‑specified briefs, we refuse to assign roles too early, we introduce time‑boxed “impossibility checkpoints” at which teams must re‑frame their goal against new constraints. This intentional exposure corresponds to the experience dimension of Future‑Skills Literacy: learners do not merely hear about future skills, they feel their frictions and affordances in the muscles of day‑to‑day project work .

Crucially, tutors resist the urge to smooth the road. Instead they model meta‑reflection—pausing workshops to name the discomfort, trace its systemic causes, and convert it into design parameters. The classroom becomes an ethnographic studio in which students study their own adaptive behaviour as data. Such recursive observation nurtures the critical‑reflection dimension of Future‑Skills Literacy: competence models are not external yardsticks but dialogic objects that teams bend, question and refine in situ.

Maturity Steps pf Future Skills Literacy (Ehlers 2025)

4 Co‑Creative Courage: Redesigning Programmes as Acts of Collective Imagination

Across our collaboration with partners in Bari, Besançon, and Valencia, a fundamental and unsettling question continues to resurface: “Where in our programme structures do we dare to remove something?” This is not a trivial curriculum design decision—it is a matter of institutional courage and creative agency.

At the core of this challenge lies the recognition that implementing a new Future Skills framework, such as TRIComp, is not merely a matter of overlaying new competencies onto existing structures. Rather, it requires deep curricular redesign—a readiness to disrupt routines, displace established content hierarchies, and rethink pedagogical logics.

This process is unfolding unevenly across our partner contexts. In Bari, for example, we see encouraging momentum: interdisciplinary teams of university lecturers, higher VET instructors, and company mentors have begun to engage in structured co-design ateliers. These experimental spaces bring together diverse stakeholders to collectively imagine and sketch hybrid learning blocks—studio-based formats that integrate applied research challenges, green-design sprints, and AI-supported simulation work. These are not theoretical exercises but genuine acts of collective imagination, anchored in the realities of programme planning and workplace demands.

In contrast, our partners in Besançon and Valencia are still in earlier stages of this transition. While there is strong interest in engaging with the TRIComp framework, institutional space for co-creative experimentation has not yet fully materialised. The challenge here is less about technical feasibility and more about creating protected environments in which imaginative curricular work can take place—spaces where it is possible to question what is essential, what can be reimagined, and what may need to be let go.

The courage to engage in this kind of collaborative prototyping—especially when it means unlearning entrenched patterns—is precisely what we mean by creative literacy in the Future Skills sense. It is not only about applying an external model but about bending institutional routines to open new pathways for learning. In doing so, these early efforts are already feeding valuable insights back into the development of the TRIComp descriptors. This mutual reinforcement between research-based modelling and field-based redesign is exactly the dynamic our research team had envisioned from the outset: a truly iterative, co-creative, and transformative process of shaping future-ready educational architectures.