The Job Affair 

Many European countries suffer from youth unemployment for a range of reasons, and  this projects objective is to address this issue and look at supporting youth workers in competence development skills (for the further 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 still room for lots of improvement.

In youth work, we have the instrument of the youth pass at European level,  a lot of countries have own national recognizing tools for competences, and each young person can use the European CV format (the Europass CV) for presenting the skills and competences towards employers. But only few still know, how to work effectively with it (e.g. what to present if I have already Youthpass from 6 different events).

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 is the central focus for a project we would like to develop.

During the preparatory meeting, the team started by listing the needs perceived in the field in orderto define the projects' objectives and strategies.

Needs of youth workers

• To enable young people to reveal what their talent and potential is.

• To get motivation to pursue young people to get these competences they need to reach their dreams.

• To provide Concrete tools to work with it, like session lay outs, methods, models of interventions, programmes for youth workers.

• Make youth workers understand the relevance of their work, in terms of the values, being proud of being able to help youth to develop in their life.