Building skills for social entrepreneurship. Game based training to answer the disruptive shift that will reshape the youth workforce landscape. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Building skills for social entrepreneurship. Game based training to answer the disruptive shift that will reshape the youth workforce landscape.

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 youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment

Project Summary

In January 2016, the EU28 youth unemployment rate stood at 17,9% (more than twice than the adult rate) and 3,9 million Europeans aged 16-24 were neither in employment nor in education or training, with no signs of improvement in sight. Workforce demand has changed, rising unemployment and underemployment specially in youth collective. Although the rates of some countries as UK (12%) and Poland (15,2%) are lower than the rates of the EU28 (17,9%), other countries as Greece (45,2%) and Spain (42,2%) still being high and represent a big challenge for the public authorities and for the society in general.

Young persons who stay unemployed or underemployed for long periods have a higher risk of being in this category, suffering economic exclusion and provoking his/her exclusion from the labour market in adulthood. Eurofound reports (2015) said that many young people within countries are at greater risk than others, and there is a particular need to focus on the most disadvantaged and furthest from the labour market. The general approach is to regard young people as assets rather than problems, and to work with them in responding to their interests, as well as their needs, whilst seeking to capitalise on their creative and innovative capacities. So, it’s necessary to promote (EC – Expert group report 2016) the soft competences that will deal with the new requirements of labour market together with some technical skills to enhance their insertion in the labour market.

To address youth unemployment, young people need to access to training that promotes competences and skills required by new and future social and economic challenges. Ageing society, rise of smart systems as well as globally connected worlds are (among others) new components of the labour market that require specific key and transversal skills as: social intelligence, trans-disciplinary, design mindset and cross-cultural competences (among others).

These new drivers and emerging skills have a direct clear impact in social entrepreneurship ecosystem. The rapid growth in social enterprise businesses is one such way to do this, allowing young people direct access to the jobs market in an environment that puts their development at its heart. Social businesses spur cooperation between the public sector, civil society, private business and the education sector – cooperation that can help create new employment opportunities through education, training schemes or practical work experience. Thus, training for social entrepreneurship opportunity represent the suitable framework to develop these emerging competences creating a disruptive innovation in the learning map.

Thus, GATES project main objective was to enhance the employability of young people and their position in the labour market, addressing these fresh competences and skills in the framework of social entrepreneurship through game based learning.
In order to achieve this main objective, project aims to:
– Implement a knowledge map that includes these emerging (and required) competences in social entrepreneurship ecosystem;
– Develop a new pedagogical methodology based on games to promote future skills in of workforce landscape and social entrepreneurship;
– Build an informal, open and collaborative environment that supports learning and facilitates knowledge and ideas sharing, while promoting joint entrepreneurship activities (peer-mentoring approach);
– Create a critical mass on project topic and involve different actors, enhancing the multi stakeholder approach.
GATES project beneficiaries are young workers who need to improve emerging key and transversal skills – in the framework of this project we can define “young workers” as all workers between 18 and 23 years employed and unemployed (we limited the age because by 2020 they have to deal with these emerging competences).

The project started in December 2017 and will finished on September 2019 (18 months), and it will be implemented by 4 institutions of 4 different EU countries: Poland, Greece, Spain and UK.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 117060,89 Eur

Project Coordinator

FUNDACJA AUTOKREACJA & Country: PL

Project Partners

• INTERACTIVE MEDIA KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER INTERMEDIAKT
• THE YOUNG FOUNDATION LBG
• DRAMBLYS