The project aims at realizing an action-research for the definition and the validation of a specific professional profile and of its relevant qualification: the psychiatric residential care community operator. The partners’ intentions are focused on the development of vocational training opportunities which should specifically take into account the transparency and transferability of their results and outcomes towards vocational training systems and sector-related labour market needs. The different steps of the work plan are: 1) a comparative analysis and the following formalisation of data (structural, management and care related characteristics and typologies) concerning the different kinds of psychiatric residential care structures and communities dealing with reception, recovery and rehabilitation; 2) a comparative analysis of the different national models of psychiatric assistance with the aim of studying the issues concerned with the recent transformations which all over Europe led from long term hospitalisation or residential or semi-residential approaches to very differentiated ones; 3) a comparative analysis of the fragmented panorama of (accredited and unaccredited) professional profiles and sub-profiles in the sector; 4) the definition of a standard certification system; 5) the definition of a European framework aiming at the use of transferable methodologies and languages, consistent with the concreteness of the different psychiatric services; 6) the promotion of a qualification transparency based on shared training and validation systems of formal, informal and non formal competences; 7) the common definition of methodologies and tools for the organization, the management and the continuous control of outcomes and qualitative standards.