The contents of Education for Sustainable Development should be included in teachers’ initial and advanced training programs. A sustainable consciousness is one of the main foundations for determining the key competences for sustainability. However, there are not many empirical studies that deal with consciousness from education. In this context, the e-portfolio appears as a tool that promotes reflection and critical thinking, which are key competences for consciousness development. This work intends to propose a categorization system to extract types of consciousness and identify the levels of consciousness of teachers in training. For this research work, which is of an eminently qualitative nature, we have selected 25 e-portfolios of students (teachers in pre-service training) in the last year of the School of Education at the University of Macerata (Italy). The qualitative methodological procedure that was followed enabled deducing three bases that shape the consciousness of teachers in training: thinking, representation of reality, and type of consciousness. We concluded that the attainment of a sustainable consciousness in teachers requires activating and developing higher levels of thinking, as well as a projective and macrostructural representation of reality.

The need to address generational change and the challenges of a global market in terms of maintaining productivity require small and medium enterprises, mainly of an artisanal nature, to rethink training. The challenges mainly concern production capacity, which is increasingly problematic given that demand does not allow for long-term schedules and enhancement of human resources. There are many tensions and just as many needs for improvement, and training is therefore the space in which to collect and rework in order to restore a new perspective of sustainable and quality change.This study presents a process of collaboration between universities and businesses, in which the former provide the framework for the activation of mechanisms that make use of work analysis, while the latter provide the appropriate support (time and opportunities for discussion) to allow for a review of the proposed training model and trainer functions in a dynamic and complex production environment.