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Generation Y’s Virtual Guide to Skill Development and Personal Branding in Social Media
Start date: Sep 1, 2015, End date: Aug 31, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Today, university students in the scope of their academic lessons, can acquire variety of information and skills and graduate as equipped with technical skills like computer literacy and language. However, at the stage of hiring, employers would also like to see a certain level of competence in behavioral skills such as leadership, teamwork and innovation along with technical knowledge and experience. Even though higher education institutions offer internship placements, employer introductions and career consultancy services for students to support their transition from education to work life, there still resides an urgent need to expand career education and define what is needed to get the right job and ways of getting there, especially for generation "Y" students who has different expectations and behavioral styles compared to previous generations. Developing soft employability skills, such as self-awareness, leadership and conflict management, alone simply is not enough to land on the right job. The generation Y’s fluency and comfort with technology together with the rise of social networks have reshaped how people engage with each other in the past decade. In response, job market recruiters quickly adapted to these changing conditions and started leveraging social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter, which are powerful tools to connect employers and job seekers. More and more of the initial background screening carried out by recruiters today, are now handled by social media, making it the greatest source used by job seekers to advertise their personal “brand” and to demonstrate that they have the required employability skills, proving they are the best fit. In light of this, students’ need to learn how to manage a strong personal brand and build an online profile along with developing their networking skills became inevitable. The main aim of this Project is to design a virtual guide to soft skill development and personal branding in social media for Generation Y job seekers. The premise of the Project states that the better equipped the candidate with the necessary soft skills, the better the fit between the candidate and the organization would be and the higher the individuals’ and thus, the respective organization’s performance would be. This in turn, should benefit the collective EU organizations’ talent benchmark and business performance as well as decrease the levels of ineffective unemployment in the EU. The main output of the project, “Generation Y’s Virtual Guide to Skill Development and Personal Branding in Social Media” is a modern and practical curriculum suitable for the needs of generation Y. While the guide will be created for students, it can be used by higher education organizations’ departments offering career development trainings as well. By referring to this guide, students will be able to a) understand changing world and business conditions, b) learn the soft skills preferred by employers and how to develop them, c) manage their own personal brand, and d) effectively market themselves to the employers via the use of social media. The project results and especially its concrete output, a virtual guide, will have important impact at the local, regional, national, and international levels. At the local and regional level, project activities that specifically target University students in different regions in Turkey, France, and Sweden will help to promote employability of young people seeking to enter the labor market. In the long run, university students who gain the necessary behavioral competencies and manage their own personal brands effectively will be examples for the younger generations. At the national level, the project will influence decision-makers to take a step towards promoting youth employability. Improved relationship between public institutions and civil society will be sustainable. Throughout the project, partners are expected to share new approaches with each other and other stakeholders. As a result of international relations and networking activities, collaboration in the field of career development will improve internationally. As this project will develop special methods and resources suitable for the generation Y, the results will be appealing and cultivating for the scope of variety of institutions working on youth unemployment. It will also contribute to the modernization of higher education by using high level information technologies and methods suitable for the learning models of generation Y in related future projects.

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