With 187,000 businesses and more than 1.1 million employees in North Rhine-Westphalia, a competitive skilled crafts sector is an important component for a healthy SME sector. The aim is to maintain the employment potential of the skilled crafts sector. This is especially true in view of the challenges currently and in the future in coping with demographic change, improving energy and resource efficiency, and gender and family mainstreaming. The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia has recognised this and, with the “Crafts Initiative NRW”, has created an instrument to meet the challenges. A central component of the “Crafts Initiative 2.0” is the implementation of the “Future Initiative Crafts NRW”. Its task is to promote the competence development of small and medium-sized enterprises in the skilled crafts sector with a view to current and future challenges and thus to secure the potential of the skilled crafts sector in terms of employment, growth and social value creation. nexus is evaluating the Future Initiative for the Skilled Crafts North Rhine-Westphalia – Energy Efficiency and Demographic Change in the Skilled Crafts Sector.

The focus is on the scientific examination of the project structure and the measures used in the Future Initiative with the aim of identifying potentials and deficits as well as opportunities and risks and supporting strategic further development. The underlying approach of activating evaluation aims to actively reinforce successful processes and strategies beyond an assessment and to identify and avoid undesirable developments and deviations from process planning.

Duration: 09/2016 – 10/2016
Client: Landes-Gewerbeförderungsstelle des nordrhein-westfälischen Handwerks (LGH)
Team: Frank Balzer, Carina Brumme