Building Transitional Skills for a Sustainable Construction Ecosystem: Educational Innovation and Societal Impact of the BuildSkills Academy Project.

The twin green and digital transition is reshaping the built environ- ment and generating urgent demand for new competences across the construction ecosystem. In this context, Vocational Education and Training (VET) must move beyond static provision models and adopt more adaptive and quality-oriented approaches. This paper analyses the BuildSkills Academy (BSA) as a transnational framework for supporting sustainable transitions through skills intelligence, curriculum enrichment, provider self-assessment and certification. It examines how BSA addresses awareness, equity, skills development and institutional capacity-building in construction. Methodologically, the paper combines literature on sustainable construction, circularity, digitalisation and VET transformation with a qualitative analysis of project materials on skills-gap analysis, BESM, pilot implementation, quality assurance and certification. Findings show that BSA contributes by translating transition priorities into structured topical areas, occupations and competences; supporting VET providers through a three-step process of self-assessment, gap identification and enrichment; testing transferability through twelve pilot courses across EQF levels and national contexts; and linking curriculum innovation with external validation and certification principles.