Up-skilling and motivating low-skilled young adults through key competences to unlock their potential for employment and social life Erasmus Project

Project Title

Up-skilling and motivating low-skilled young adults through key competences to unlock their potential for employment and social life

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Access for disadvantaged; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

e-STEP aims at upskilling and supporting vulnerable young adults (from disadvantaged backgrounds and with fewer opportunities) in the acquisition of key competences for their professional and personal life.

The key competencies are becoming increasingly important due to not only the need of adequate professional and business skills and abilities and higher adult employability, but also because they expand opportunities for adults’ personal fulfilment, eventually leading to a more meaningful and happier life. Key competences are a significant factor to social and economic development and for the wealth creation so their development becomes an important challenge for themselves.

There is a need for young adults to enhance their personal and professional skills and competences. Given the current instability in the labour market and the need to reduce the risk of social exclusion, this applies particularly to the low-skilled and the low-qualified. Moreover, expanding the adult education to those more vulnerable groups can create new possibilities for active inclusion and enhanced social participation.

In this context, e-STEP project will design and test a training and coaching syllabus on key competences to low-skilled and vulnerable young adults, taking also advantage of the use of digital tools and learning. Key competences addressed will mainly include digital, communication and social skills, along with learning to learn, entrepreneurship and cultural awareness and expression, but with the particularity that the learning contents will be specifically chosen based on the final beneficiaries’ identified needs and educational shortages. In order to enhance their motivation, the final beneficiaries will play a key and a very active role since the project inception, participating in the identification of their own training needs and in the design of the learning syllabus they will be benefited from.

The partner consortium, composed of 5 public and private institutions from 4 EU countries (France, Sweden, Greece and Spain) with expertise in adult education and direct access to final beneficiaries, will jointly develop:

• A transnational identification report on the educational demands and challenges pointed out by the target group. To do so, partners will first conduct some interviews/questionnaires and encounters with representatives from the target groups. Using the insights from the questionnaires along with research work, each partner will elaborate an individual report on the target group’ educational challenges and demands. The transnational analysis will be the comparative analysis of the regional work, looking for common patterns. 100 young adults will be participating in this transnational diagnosis along with 20 experts and stakeholders.

• The e-STEP transnational syllabus on key competences, including the necessary educational tools for training implementation, developed by the project partners, based on the insights from the transnational analysis. In order to maximize the transferability character of this final output, the programme will be available in English, French, Spanish, Swedish and Greek. This training programme will be composed of selected learning outcomes from the eight key competences based on the previous identification of learning needs phase. Once it is designed, the programme will be tested and evaluated twice at transnational level. Training courses will be delivered to at least 15 young vulnerable adults in the 4 project countries (60 beneficiaries in total).

The programme will be therefore designed taking into account their final beneficiaries own identified needs, while related stakeholders will also play a crucial role in the support service design and in the project activities. An evaluation of the training is also planned in order to present a programme that fully replays to the identified necessities and target group’s demands and will make this output easily transferable to other territories.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 248036 Eur

Project Coordinator

Centre Régional Information Jeunesse Occitanie Pyrénées Méditerranée & Country: FR

Project Partners

• FOLKUNIVERSITETET STIFTELSEN VID LUNDS UNIVERSITET
• SERVICIO DE EMPLEO DE CATALUNYA
• DESARROLLO DE ESTRATEGIAS EXTERIORES SA
• DIMITRA EDUCATION & CONSULTING SA