As part of the regular annual activities within the E4E@мк project "Education for Employment in North Macedonia" in which ECNM is one of the three partners, the Chamber hosted a working meeting with the regional director of Helvetas for Southeast Europe Mathias Herr and Nikola Babić from the regional office of Helvetas in Belgrade.
At the meeting, the Chamber presented the previous activities in which the business sector is included within the project, as well as the potential for future fields of action in the direction of the promotion of dual education, but also the educational policies as a whole, for creating skilled staff for the needs of the economy.
The E4E@мк project, which has been active for the fifth year in our country, continuously has progress and positive visible results, both in terms of raising the meaning and importance of dual education in the business sector, as well as in the perception of students and parents about the meaning and importance of a vocational secondary school education from the aspect of faster employability. The role of the Economic Chamber as a partner in the whole process is more than visible and gives extremely positive results. The capacity of the Chamber in its structure has 19 associations, 15 associations, and more than 50 groups within its forms of action, but also four new councils, two of which deal with education (the Council for Training and the Council for the Advancement of Higher Education and strategic research). 
Although the current activities have already been defined, there is a need for additional new forms of rapid action within the framework of the project arising from the new conditions on the ground related to global migration, which of course seriously affects our country and the Western Balkans region as a whole. If this is followed by the fact that Macedonian companies work in extremely specific conditions in terms of business predictability and there is not a large number of companies that have medium-term development plans, and the number of companies with long-term strategies is even smaller, supplemented by global flows of the mutation of the crises, we believe that in the next period, a crucial emphasis should be placed on the preparation of quick analyzes in the short term for three to six months, through which the situation will be monitored by sectors, activities, what are the needs of the companies, for the staff they need. For this, the Swiss experience of this type of monitoring of labor market conditions is certainly welcome. At the same time, the Chamber should be the main bearer of the promotion of dual education by creating various forms of activities throughout the year.
Natasa Janevska, M.Sc., coordinator of the Training and Training Council, referred to the activities that, within the framework of the Centers at the council, contribute to the development and upgrading of processes for greater visibility of dual education, the system of retraining and retraining of personnel for the needs of companies , as well as the preparation of the platform for the Labor Exchange. 
The operations director, Mihajlo Donev, MSc, expressed his gratitude to the audience for the great cooperation we have built in the past years, which continues to grow in the Second Phase of the E4E@мк project. Helvetas as an organization has a capacity that is of great support to the activities of the Chamber in the field of education, a reliable partner for the transfer of knowledge, as well as access to experts, study visits and networking with Swiss professional associations in order to strengthen and expand the capacities of our associations and councils within the Chamber developing into systemic actors in many processes. In the coming period, we will continue to strengthen the engagement of the private sector by creating connections not only with schools and companies for vocational education and training, but also with universities.
Helvetas is an independent Swiss development organization that develops capacities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe through project activities. Through its unit for Eastern Europe, Helvetas has been present in North Macedonia since 2003, working on activities that increase the employability of young people.
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