In the European Union, about 20% of young people leave the school/ education system without qualifications and/ or drop out of the system. Partner countries, hit hard by the economic crisis, have faced a significant rise in the number of youngsters who are unemployed or dropping out of school. To respond to this growing problem, and in line with the Europe 2020 strategy for a sustainable, smart and inclusive economy, we have set up the project “Y.S. ALL – Youth Strategies Access to Labor Land”. This strategic partnership project for the exchange of good practices aimed and achieved the following objectives:
– To share and pool our knowledge, our experiences and our reflections with our partners relating to social inclusion and support towards the employment of young people without qualifications, in order to broaden our educational approaches and re-qualify our teaching methods and tools.
– To promote the transfer of practices between all participating countries.
– To involve, throughout the project, local partners of the participating countries to support and integrate young people without qualifications. This goal has been more difficult to achieve due to the Covid-19 epidemic which has prompted economic actors to stop or reduce their professional activities. Their commitment to this project has therefore been reduced.
– To build and carry out surveys and interviews with youngsters without qualifications and local businesses whose trades are under strain (lack of labor) to find out how they represent the personal and professional skills essential to obtain a job.
– To create, from the results of the interviews, a repository of key skills essential to obtain a job (both from the point of view of the youth and the company employers)
– To implement thematic workshops for young people to facilitate their professional integration.
– To create an online educational booklet to promote good educational practices resulting from the project
– To make visible and enhance the results of the project by collectively organizing a communication strategy.
Our project targeted:
– Young people without qualifications who have benefited from our support for the formalization and recognition of their skills. Most of them participated in thematic workshops to increase their knowledge and capacities in topics facilitating their integration. (number reached: 101 beneficiaries).
– Youth workers, educators, experts in non-formal education, actors of professional integration, social workers, who participated in the development and benefit from the research, educational booklet to facilitate their support of young people towards employment by relying on non-formal education methods. (number affected 31
– The local companies of each partner country who were asked to know their expectations in terms of skills essential for a young person to obtain a position. (number affected 27
The results of our project are as follows:
– Data collection from interviews with the life stories of youngsters, interviews with jobseeker, interviews with youth workers, social workers carried out following the first seminar.
– The implementation of three thematic workshops at the initiative of each partner and determined during the seminars, then set up with young targets of each partner community, entitled ” my vision of work ”, ” the professions have- do they have a gender? ”and“ discrimination in hiring ”.
– The construction of a skills framework, based on the previous results (interviews and workshops).
– The creation of the online educational booklet, also based on the previous results.
– The implementation of two company employer workshops: “learning to use the repository” and “knowing and using skills recognition tools”.
– The implementation of 4 seminars involving partners and participants in the project to jointly prepare and follow the key stages of the project. During the seminars, we built the interview grids from our objectives. To ensure good coordination of our activities in our territories, at each seminar, we collectively tested a thematic workshop sequence. The goal is for the educators involved to experience the activity in order to better analyze it and adapt it to their context and to the tools created. During the seminars, partners shared their feedback on the setting up of thematic workshops and the assessment made by learners and trainers. From these data, we were able to complete and adapt the thematic workshops (interests, audiences, objectives, progress, risks, opportunities, variants, etc.) which fed the final booklet.
