Job Bridge for Volunteers Erasmus Project

Project Title

Job Bridge for Volunteers

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Recognition, transparency, certification; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Volunteering is an important way for people to develop themselves, by building new relationships and gaining a whole set of life skills that can improve their employability. It serves to gather important experience in unknown fields and to develop social, personal and organisational competences. Valuable competences, frequently developed through informal and non-formal learning in volunteering, are rarely validated and certified by voluntary organisations. This leaves a huge amount of progress and development that cannot be demonstrated or proven to potential stakeholders. Therefore, validation represents a considerable opportunity for volunteers and those people working with them.

Job Bridge aimed to fill this gap by developing a fully-fledged user-centred approach for validating non-formal and informal learning processes in volunteering activities, including a well proven web-based documentation, both for learners and those supervising them, the “facilitators”.

After the development phase, the partnership carried out a 3-day training course in Göttingen, Germany, that involved 22 trainers, facilitators and multipliers. These work either directly with volunteers or cooperate with volunteering organisations. The course aimed to make participants familiar with the Job Bridge approach and to prepare the piloting phase, in which the Job Bridge approach was implemented in informal learning projects with volunteers.

From the experience reports can be derived that all partners found many benefits and advantages to using the methodology. The methodology enabled the volunteers to set goals and learning objectives, and to clearly see and track their progress – especially as their competences were evaluated at the beginning, mid-way through the process, and at the end. Obtaining a certificate at the end to evidence skill, knowledge and attitude development was welcomed and often seen as a source of pride. Further, their personal development was seen as contributing to improved educational and career prospects and opportunities. The methodology enabled participants to look at volunteering from a different angle, and to appreciate the learning dimension of their activities.

The piloting phase involved 18 facilitators who carried out 28 learning projects involving 190 volunteers that reflected and evidenced their social and personal competences like initiative taking, self-reflection, flexibility, learning to learn etc. in their volunteering activities. The volunteering organisations, by guiding and supporting the volunteers, improved their mentoring competences, like coaching and promoting personal development, and their knowledge and competences on validation of competence developments.

The competences acquired during the volunteering activities were validated and documented by means of the LEVEL5 system. The validation offer raised interest, and learners clearly saw its benefits in terms of authenticating their competences and including them as part of their portfolio of achievements.
The Job Bridge approach has provided volunteers with the opportunity to measure the progress made during their learning projects and validate the experience through the LELVEL5 system. This is a key outcome for the project as for many volunteers it was an opportunity not only to validate their informal learning but also introduced the benefits of self-reflection in the evaluation of their experiences.

For the volunteering organisations involved in the project we can conclude that they were interested in the concept of validation and in finding feasible tools and methods of competence assessment and documentation. This allows them for planning and following volunteers’ activities in order to develop the competences they chose.
Some of them used the Youthpass and see LEVEL5 as a complementary tool. From their experience many young people have problems in describing their acquired competences as the key competences in the Youthpass are very general; LEVEL5 helps better understand what is meant with the competences.

The Job Bridge consortium was implemented by a multi-actor partnership of eight partners from seven countries and combines the expertise and experience of different types of actors with an extremely large outreach through hundreds of member organisations of the participating networks. The partnership consists of three network organisations that work in the field of volunteering, civil society and lifelong learning. There is one large volunteering organisation representing several thousands of volunteers European wide. Job Bridge connects this with two organisations representing the employment sector: one chamber of commerce and one HR agency. The partnership is completed by a European network which has been working on innovative validation approaches at the interface of informal and formal learning since 2005.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 294040 Eur

Project Coordinator

BUPNET BILDUNG UND PROJEKT NETZWERKGMBH & Country: DE

Project Partners

• LA LIGUE DE L’ENSEIGNEMENT
• BLENDED LEARNING INSTITUTIONS COOPERATIVE
• CAMARA OFICIAL DE COMERCIO E INDUSTRIA DE CACERES
• Conferenza dei Collegi Universitari di Merito
• LIFELONG LEARNING PLATFORM
• VOLUNTEERING MATTERS
• CATRO BULGARIA