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The Job Affair
Start date: Aug 15, 2015, End date: Aug 14, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Many European countries suffer the consequences from youth unemployment for a range of reasons, this project objective was to address this issue and look at supporting youth workers in competence development skills, so that they can in turn support of the development of competencies of the young people they work with.There is a proved match between skills demanded by employers and skills developed in youth organisations. Out of studies, such as The European Youth Forum’s study about the contribution of non-formal education in terms of increased employability, the soft skills that employers most frequently demand include communication skills, organisational/planning skills, decision-making skills, team working skills, confidence/autonomy and numeracy. Five of these six most frequently demanded soft skills that employers require are also being amongst those skills developed to a greater extent in youth organisations, the exception being numeracy. These soft skills are seen as a key element for successful job performance. Certain personality traits are also found to be important components of these skills and competencies, contributing to their development. For example, sense of initiative and pro-activity are traits associated with confidence/autonomy and entrepreneurship. Employers do also have a positive attitude towards young people’s experience in youth organizations. Employers however stress a special emphasis on the way of presenting the skills and competences (what they present, how they present it has more impact than what is written on the paper) acquired during the participation in youth work, which is an area where there is room for much improvement. In European youth work, there is Youthpass and a lot of countries have their own national recognizing tools for competences. Each young person can use the European CV format (the Europass CV) for presenting the skills and competences towards employers. But its still challenging for most young people to know how to work effectively with these tools in order to optimise their employability. This goes in line with the recommendation of the European Youth Forum to work further on the transitioning to employability: there is a need to greater guidance and coaching for young people so that they are better able to present effectively the skills and competences they develop in the youth sector in job applications and that they are able to better understand how these skills may be applied in working environments, and can contribute to the performance of specific job-related tasks. Young workers should be made more aware about the value that employers place on the skills and the competencies developed in the youth work, and youth workers can be trained in how to support the young people they work with, in this topic. That was the central focus of the Job Affair training course. With this project we brought youth workers toghether, supported them in enabling young people to better assess and express their competences for employment purposes. Objectives of the project were: • to inspire and increase capacity of youth workers to develop activities with the focus of employability; • to enable youth workers to help young people to become self aware about their competencies, to show evidence of those, and to recognise spaces for further development; • to prepare youth workers to help young people articulate, adapt and transfer the description of their competencies into different working contexts; • to provide/develop concrete tools for youth workers to use with their target group to work the self-awareness of competencies relevant for employability; • to increase competencies about assessing impact of youth work activities towards employability

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