Textile is a generic word that groups highly correlated but distinct sectors of activity. It can be roughly divided into fiber, fabric, apparel and retail. The fiber/fabric industry is the third sector worldwide after tourism and the information industry and before the automobile and chemical industries, with a 2.8% annual world growth.
In the E.U, the fiber/fabric industry is the second employment provider after the automobile industry and still belongs to the main European economic centers. All around the E.U., 1.3 million people are employed in the fiber/fabric industry and 1 million in the apparel industry. In France, fiber/fabric and apparel industries register together about 510 000 jobs and a total sales turnover of 26 billion euros (43% being export sales), while the retail sector registers 190 000 employment and 34 billion sales turnover.
This textile galaxy (fiber/fabric together with apparel/retail) is a quickly evolving sector, where past and future are overlapping. In traditional activities like spinning mills and clothing manufactures, quite everything is changing in scale, technologies, localizations... and management. ERP is no more a plus, but a requested feature. In the same time, the "new fibers" of the past are becoming traditional ones, while new "new fibers" are being created. Moreover, completely new sectors are appearing like nonwovens and technical textiles, sized to fit specific needs from automobile, aeronautics, health-care, etc. [5].
In the sector of export, France occupies the 7th world place in the field of clothing and the 9th place for the fiber/fabric field. The present evolution of countries like India, Brazil, Korea or China (a potential market of 1.2 billion consumers) is largely widening the textile market. The world request for textile products and clothing increase annually from 2.5 to 3%.
The world trade progresses of the double of this rate on average. According to the WTO, the world trade concerning fiber/fabric/apparel represents an annual value of exchanges of 330 billion dollars, that is to say 8.5% of the world trade of the manufactured goods. Thus, the world textile trade is at the 5th rank of the manufactured goods with high intensity of exchanges.
On the level of the creation of these fibers, in the research carried out in laboratories, or in manufacturing and the implementation of these new technologies, the experience inherited from the past must be put at the service of innovation. More than ever, technicians and engineers must be trained toward what does not exist yet, and not "to win the former war".
The needs to train specialists cannot be ignored in such diversified fields as textile technologies, technical textiles, textile logistics, textile creation and design. A total offer of continuous training in France and to foreign countries is impossible to circumvent.