Background The ventilation market has grown substantially and the technical development is rapid.Within the whole of Europe, especially within the participating countries and several of the candidate countries, there is significant new building under construction. Partly due to a lot of housing construction but above all due to a lot of construction of commercial and public premises; shopping centres, hospitals, schools, etc. In certain countries there is also extensive renovation and reconstruction going on, especially in the new EU countries. In Sweden alone approx. 35 000 flats are planned during 2007, to a value of approx. 80 billion SEK and commercial premises to a value of approx. 90 billion SEK. Construction has changed substantially. The distribution of costs between the different parts of construction (ground and foundation work cost, construction costs, installation costs etc) is now very different from 20 - 25 years ago.In commercial premises the costs for installations (building services installations, ventilation etc) account for more, sometimes a lot more than, 50 % of the total cost of construction as opposed to 25 % previously.Ventilation accounts for a considerable part of the installation costs, mainly in commercial premises but also in modern flats.The lack of labour is significant. According to statistics from the trade organization "Svensk Ventila-tion", a few hundred trained ventilation technicians are needed in Sweden alone. The average age within the profession is over 50.During the sixties and seventies the large ventilation companies were usually responsible for training in Sweden. The large restructuring of the trade has led to this training being altogether terminated. The only current vocational training is a "KY" training course at IUC (The training centre for installation engineers) in Katrineholm.In Latvia there is an elementary training course for ventilation technicians. In Poland and Lithuania there is a certain amount of internal ventilation training in large companies. This training can also be described as elementary.In Poland work is ongoing preparing the education administration for a new training in ventilation technology.We would like to claim that many, perhaps the majority of the workers within the ventilation trade, have a great need for further training. Some have no training whatsoever.There is no training at upper secondary level for the ventilation trade's manufacturing industry and fitters as well as coherent training material. Among other things this means that the coming generation of skilled workers is limited.The training material must of course be used for this purpose as well.The situation is similar in all of Europe.The EU has, among other things through TC 156 "Ventilation for buildings" drawn up guidelines for a European ventilation standard. The EU also has drawn up a number of energy directives which are of importance to the ventilation technology, among other things "Energy efficiency status and indoor climate status", "Energy- declarations, methods, design and registers". As far as we can tell there are no incentives to implement these directives more than that they have been published in English or in some cases, translated into languages within "the old EU".A condition for these directives having an effect in the EU and thereby creating a common venti-lation market is that they become part of the ventilation training.