GRaduate Ongoing Workqualification Towards offering Highly qualified skills for SMEs Erasmus Project

Project Title

GRaduate Ongoing Workqualification Towards offering Highly qualified skills for SMEs

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; Cooperation between educational institutions and business; Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship)

Project Summary

Society loses out on potential growth if we do not resolve the structural problem in getting highly-educated graduates from different professions faster in work. However, it is a challenge that many SMEs have no tradition for hiring highly educated staff and that many highly educated graduates have no knowledge of job possibilities in SMEs. Thus, there is an untapped potential in connecting SMEs with a need for development and innovation with newly graduates. The intention is to contribute to increased growth in businesses and create a basis for increased employment-rates.

In order to assure that ends meet – graduates getting employment and SMEs getting the staff they need the project will create a cross-border digital platform that will collect inputs from SMEs about their skill shortage and subsequently design an education set-up so that unemployed obtain the sought after skills.

Universities and University colleges play a crucial role in the development of society and they have to supply SMEs with strong graduates in order for business to realize their growth potential and ambitions.
In this specific project, the partners offer high quality education and the graduates have a strong subject-specific knowledge. Furthermore, the graduates have gained transferable skills such as entrepreneurship, digital literacy and creativity but sometimes those skills need to be refined to meet the demands of a constantly changing labour market.

It will be a collaboration between university/university college teachers and enterprises in three countries. This collaboration will ensure that teaching staff get substantial knowledge about the skills that companies need so that will have an impact on their everyday teaching and planning of curriculum and the participation from enterprises to ensure that the competencies presented aligns with the enterprises needs.

The objectives of Growth4SMEs
1. Develop and set-up a digital platform – open source where SMEs can register needs for competencies
2. Reactivate already existing university and university colleges’ user panels and open up the digital platform for their registration of demanded competencies
3. Perform analysis of demand of skills both on a cross-country and regional level
4. Develop open and collaborative learning and sharing spaces, such as a MOOC and regional courses co-created in collaboration between universities/university colleges, SMEs and local job centres.
5. Set-up international case-competition in each participating country (job seekers can apply for a grant to participate in one of the other countries) where local/regional business can get solutions to challenges they are facing.
6. More knowledge among teaching staff about demands for skills both at national and international level

900 adult learners will participate in the project and 150 SME interventions. The activities in the project are the build of an agile digital platform that will secure real-time insight into the demand of skills. This insight will provide an overview over skills demanded at an international level as well as a more regional specific demand. The project will make it possible to create tailored courses that will help give young graduates updated skills that complement their education background and at the same time is compliant with the need of business both in the region and in an international context. The courses – both open and collaborative learning and sharing spaces, such as a MOOC and the region specific courses will be co-created with teaching staff from universities and university colleges and enterprises. Furthermore, there will be arranged case-competitions to allow SMEs to hand in challenges and the unemployed graduates will show how their with newly acquired skills can present innovative solutions to problems.
Impact of the project will be a better understanding of the demand and supply of competencies and the creation of a stronger link between university/university colleges including teaching staff, job center and SMEs; more adult learners will find their first job in a SMEs, SMEs will be more satified with the supply of competencies and teaching staff have a better understanding of the SMEs need of competencies and how they with changes in the studyprogramme can ease the transition from education to work-life for graduates.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 316244 Eur

Project Coordinator

AARHUS UNIVERSITET & Country: DK

Project Partners

• UC LIMBURG
• AARHUS KOMMUNE
• UNIVERSITETET I OSLO