A meeting was held between the representatives of the Ministry of Education and Science and the founders of the Georgian Furniture Cluster, where the possibilities of enhancing and expanding the existing cooperation were discussed.

The Furniture Cluster was established in 2017 and includes 35 small and medium-sized companies. Cluster members include both woodworking and furniture manufacturers, as well as service providers for the industry.

The goal of creating Furniture Cluster is to develop its members and the industry as a whole. Since its inception, organization has been actively cooperating with the field of vocational education to train and retrain the workforce. At this stage of development, the task of the Cluster is to create a specialized training centre on the territory of the "Craftsman City", which will serve only the furniture manufacturing sector and will train highly qualified specialists in this field.

At the workshop, cluster members noted that expanding production and developing the sector is impossible without specialists with relevant competencies. For this, the quality of teaching and training and their scale should be significantly increased. In response to the existing challenge, joint efforts of the public and private sectors are necessary.

Tamar Kitiashvili, the Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Georgia, reaffirmed the Ministry's readiness to support such initiatives and introduced the new opportunities created for the more active involvement of the private sector in vocational education.

The workshop was held in a discussion format which identified action steps that each party will take to achieve a common goal that will help train competitive, highly qualified specialists in the furniture manufacturing sector.