Digital Literacy and Social Emotional Learning for Engagement and Employment Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Literacy and Social Emotional Learning for Engagement and Employment

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The SELFEE project aimed to give new tools for professionals to develop the transversal skills – namely social emotional learning (SEL) skills and digital competences – of unemployed people at risk of social exclusion (e.g. long-term unemployed, unemployed people from disadvantaged backgrounds). The program also included a practical training that will show/teach the unemployed people how to use these skills in searching for jobs and in keeping them.

According to the European Commission (COM/2016/0381: A NEW SKILLS AGENDA FOR EUROPE Working together to strengthen human capital, employability and competitiveness) transversal skills and key competences (such as digital competences and entrepreneurship, the latter including self-awareness, self-efficacy or the ability to work with others) are essential for personal development, social inclusion, active citizenship and employment. These skills are also “the foundation for the development of higher, more complex skills”.

Importance of SEL skills development for the unemployed:

The consequences of longer term unemployment / repeated failures in reaching unemployment can have strong psychological impact: depression, loss of self-esteem, learned helplessness (a loss of belief in that the situation can ever change, giving up trying). People with a history of prolonged unemployment often lose their social relations. To reverse this psychological process the first step should be to give these people hope, to make them rediscover their strengths and resources. Within the broad concept of social emotional learning, we would like to focus on the development of specific skills (i.e. self-efficacy, self-presentation and relational skills) that were repeatedly shown to be positively related to finding and keeping a job. These are the very skills long term unemployed lack the most. The importance of soft skills for employability is also backed by a recent (2014) international research of the European Commission, which states that developing soft skills in unemployed people can be the first step and can provide a base for other programmes (e.g. workplace oriented training, vocational training and job search assistance).

Importance of digital skills development for the unemployed:

Digital competence is a transversal key competence as well, which is increasingly required in the labour market and also for the job search itself. More than 40% of EU citizens lack basic digital skills, according to the European Commission (European semester thematic fiche digital single market: digital skills and jobs. 2016), and this lack of skills has a negative impact on long-term unemployment and inequality. In this program we will develop tools that professionals can use to teach some basic digital skills for the unemployed. DigComp 2.0. (issued by the European Commission in 2016) identifies 5 digital competence areas and 21 specific digital competences we will develop throughout the project.

TO ADDRESS these needs our project:

• created a training that is suitable to develop social and emotional skills (using different art branches and applied psychology) and basic digital competences of unemployed people
• harvested the benefits of the SEL trainings to develop more focused and realistic professional plans and more autonomy and effectiveness in pursuing them, increasing participants job searching activity

TO REACH our goals we:
1) Created training materials that offer theoretical and methodological basis for the development of social and emotional skills for unemployed people at the risk of exclusion (IO1 “SEL Foundation”)
2) Designed four different methodologies to develop social and emotional skills in the unemployed
3) Desigedn methods to develop basic digital competences in the unemployed (IO2)
4) Combined the development of transversal skills (SEL skills, basic digital competences) with elements of practical job searching training
5) Tested and validated the developed methodologies involving unemployed participants to ensure that the methods are built to answer existing needs
6) Developed and used innovative methods to assess the impact of our interventions
7) Engaged in a series of multiplier events locally and internationally to ensure that our training materials and the results of our projects reach professionals.

The SELFEE project will directly involve 246 participants in its activities (trainers, unemployed adults, experts and policy-makers) and aims to reach over 7600 secondary beneficiaries through project dissemination, exploitation and transferability. The SELFEE project will have an impact by broadening trainer’s arsenal of methods that will help them to support unemployed people in finding a job and in increasing their (digital) job search capability.

The sustainability of the project was assured by training and dissemination activities planned in the project linked to access to project outputs after completion.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 276322 Eur

Project Coordinator

DW-RS PRODUCTIES & Country: NL

Project Partners

• Associacio La Xixa Teatre
• Képes Alapítvány – a szociális és érzelmi készségfejlesztésért
• FUNDACIO PER A LA UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA
• ELAN INTERCULTUREL