Mission Possible!

TRAINING COURSE: Non formal competences in the labourmarket: mission possible!

08 -15 September 2013
Pistoia

 

This Training Course, was held in Pistoia between the 8th and the 15th of September, 2013. It brought together motivated youth workers and youth leaders active in the third sector from 10 European countries.

The project was written to support the participants in better understanding the situation of youth unemployment in Europe and specifically in the countries involved in the TC, and to give them a wider overview on the opportunities promoted by the EU to  combat the perils of Youth Unemployment. The economic crisis in which we are already since a few years led to a huge increase in the unemployment rates, with particular negative effects over young citizens.

The partners, agreeing on the idea passed from the President Barroso: “investing in young people is one of the best business plans”, intended to inspire youth to develop the skills required by the European labour market. At the same time we wanted to better understand and support the strategies to endorse the recognition of the above mentioned competences with tools such as the Youthpass and thus pursue the aim of achieving higher youth employability rates.

In addition, profiting from a great diversity of partners countries, the TC has also been really important on the side of cultural diversity and intercultural learning.  On this side we focused on fostering mutual understanding and promoting tolerance among young people and cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue, non-discrimination were always tackled during the sessions and the methods we have been using have stressed these elements.

Thanks to the choice of using non-formal education as methodology, we actively involved the participants all over the TC, sharing opinions, cooperating amongst themselves, learning from each other and conceiving project ideas together. In this way we generated an experience of great personal and professional growth with significant development of skills and competences that, through the multiplier effect, could lead to the creation of similar initiatives in the local realities of the participants. We believe we helped stimulating the participants in being active and creative and letting them understand the direction they should take in order to become more employable and facilitate their entering of the labour market.