There is a notable increase of cases of people with ASD and, accordingly, higher number of adults and elderly with ASD. So, there is an urgent need of disposing professionals with enough knowledge, skills and competences to provide a quality and efficient service to these persons and their families. In this regard, IPA+ project responds to these needs to better prepare different kind of professionals for competent care or attention in order to respond to the demands of this population. Thus, the project aims to strengthening skills of professionals working (presently or expected in the future) with people with autism through the development, at European level, of a course that will be based on basic and specific and real curricular requirements. So, the project entails the development, implementation, transfer and dissemination of an innovative training focused on a minimum package of theoretical contents, intervention strategies as well as professional competences and attitudes enabling professionals dispose a basic background to deal with autism in different labour settings. Moreover, the specific objectives of IPA+ are: - To know the curricular and training requirements of a course of this nature addressed to professionals working with people with ASD.- To define the basic knowledge and competences about autism that every professional must have for a competent and satisfactory care based on the research about curricular requirements.- To design a new training and work based learning for the development of competent professionals from different fields.- To implement this training in a sample of professionals in the different countries participating in the project.- To evaluate the quality of the course.- To make freely available all project outputs for potential users and stakeholders through the development of a toolkit.- To hold national and international conferences for disseminating the project outputs. - To establish a network of people working on ASD projects for knowledge exchange and co-creation.IPA+ involves 5 entities from 4 different countries: - Polibienestar Research Institute from the University of Valencia, Spain (coordinator of the project).- Autismo Burgos, Spain.- Portuguese Federation for Autism, Portugal.- Serbian Society of Autism, Serbia.- Autism Europe, Belgium.The coordinator is a research institute at a public university with a large know-how on ASD, research and methodologies. The three involved autism associations will be involved in the different activities in a close contact with our target users. And, an international association with strategic alliances with a large number of partners will be in charge of the project dissemination and evaluation.The project will begin with a research on curricular and training requirements for professionals in the field of ASD through a mixed methodology: review of the literature and the organisation of focus groups with relevant stakeholders. The results of this research will be crucial for the development of the subsequent phases of the project. Secondly, the curriculum will be developed on the basis of the curricular research and will be validated with experts through a Delphi study. Once the curriculum will be ready, partners will develop the associated learning units. Through a complementary learning activity, these learning units will be piloted among key persons from each partner organisation and also validated by the whole consortium. This learning activity will be very relevant to train the future trainers of the course which will be implemented in Spain, Portugal and Serbia by a blended format. Finally, the main findings and outputs developed in the project will be compiled in an attractive, useful and easy-to-use format through a Toolkit which will be available at the IPA+ website.IPA+ will deliver a research, a curriculum and associated learning units, a validated course and a toolkit for a wide kind of professionals working with people with ASD or interested in this labour sector. These outputs will be supported by a comprehensive and integrative assessment along the different activities framed in the project, as well as by a complete package of dissemination activities, such as multiplier events, a project website, eNewsletters, etc. So, IPA+ is expected mainly to:1. Raise awareness and increase knowledge of ASD for different profiles of professionals.2. Increase background, motivation, willingness and confidence of professionals to work with people with ASD. 3. Increase collaboration and cooperation between service providers in the field of autism and other organisations from different fields: education, healthcare, social services, etc.4. Generate a good practice at European level regarding training of professionals working with people with ASD agreed by experts from different countries.5. Create open-access resources and outputs for a wide and relevant audience of stakeholders.