Qualified workforce is one of the key elements currently for the industry to ensure sustainable competition both in global and local scale. The emphasize and importance placed by the providers of vocational training and education, the policy makers and private sector enterprises on the vocational education and training and cooperations established in this regard are decisive to a greater extent for ensuring qualified workforce. SMART COMET Project, accomplished accordingly and supported by Turkish National Agency within the scope of European Union Erasmus + Program, aims to reinforce the cooperation between the vocational high schools and enterprises through the life-long learning perspective and therefore contributes to the sustainable development of qualified workforce. Providing the vocational training and education system with the capability to respond to the requirements of sector-specific employment market on a high-level and contributing to enterprises on an ever-increasing competition environment within the sector is among the main objectives of the project. In addition to this, enterprises provide support and assistance to vocational education and training through various activities and opportunity to reinforce and consolidate the theoretical knowledge with practical practices and applications is offered to the students. The main objective of the project is to reinforce and consolidate the reciprocative benefits, namely win-win practice between the schools and enterprises. The Project is realized by means of a partnership established between the providers of vocational training and education of Turkey, Germany and Spain and the national and international enterprises towards enhancing the international cooperations. The Project is realized under the partnership of Ministry of National Education Directorate General for Vocational and Technical Education (Turkey), MESS Training Foundation (Turkey), DEKRA Akademie (Germany), FLM Fundacion Laboral del Metal (Spain) and the strategic partnership with the Turkish Employers Association of Metal Industries. SMART COMET is consisting of two main components; first one is the competence management model and the competence development platform (IT Tool: http://www.cometittool.com) as the output of this component and the second one is to develop the school-enterprise cooperation and proposal of the school-enterprise cooperation model. Within the process of establishment of the project outputs of these two components, five study visits were performed covering three countries for the purpose of making observations and exchanging views and opinions. The report was further revised and finalized by the evaluations of the Ministry of National Education, observations of the project partners, current European Union regulations and practices, endeavors of technical specialists and substantial contributions of the human resources specialists. As a result of this, an innovative competence management model supporting the sustainable vocational development and addressing to the entire sector and the industries of 3 participant countries is established and a competence development platform (IT Tool: http://www.cometittool.com) is accomplished to support this model. The overall results reached through this project are:•A pilot basis for school and enterprise cooperation system for the metal sector companies using a competence management (COMET) approach is developed and piloted,•A model is created for metal enterprises to better manage their workforce through learning outcome-based competence management,•Enterprise and school capacity to analyze, understand, express, address and manage human resource challenges including, but not limited to the ability to better manage and anticipate skill needs over a strategic horizon is improved though the model,•Upgrading skills and qualification of all employees in metal sector in partnership with schools is facilitated,•Schools’ participation in the cooperation model to better adapt themselves to evolving labor market needs by working closer to metal enterprises is piloted.The involvement and evaluations of Turkish Ministry of National Education in project was advantageous for the success of dissemination and exploitation of project results. This created an impact for the VET teachers and school administrators in the way of generating close ties with the private sector. The second output of the project, competence management IT tool has started to be operating in order for the sector to evaluate the development of the employees.