Youth work for career management with different abilities’ youngsters

Topics: Career guidance; Cooperation between educational institutions and business; Disabilities
Action Type: Cooperation partnerships in youth
Countries Covered: 🇩🇪 Germany 🇭🇷 Croatia 🇧🇪 Belgium 🇷🇸 Serbia 🇮🇹 Italy
Project card: https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/projects/search/details/2021-2-DE04-KA220-YOU-000050925

Project partners:

  • Outreach Hannover e.V., Germany
  • DOMAS – training, consultation and business services, Croatia
  • Out of the Box International, Belgium
  • Company for professional rehabilitation and employment of persons with disabilities ITECCION, Serbia
  • Centre for Non-formal education and Lifelong learning (CNELL), Serbia
  • LINK DMT SRL, Italy
  • Association for improvement of modern living skills “Realization”, Croatia

Summary of the project:

Financial crisis such as the ones in 2008 as well as the recent crisis with Covid-19 pandemic have caused an increase of unemployment rate. The consequences of such crisis are mainly noticed among young people who are in the phases of planning to develop their professional career. On the other hand, career orientation and management are being recognised more and more as an essential aspect of one’s life. While businesses and institutions are constantly experiencing changes and adaptation to new trends in their operation, the need for new skills development from employees are unavoidable. Thus, there is a need for young people to be proactive when it comes to new skills development. While young people experience and choose different programmes to attend due to their curiosity in learning, there is a point in their life when they usually consider themselves as non-decided to which field or role, they see themselves working in the near future. In many cases this results in short-time employment for different institutions or job positions and not being competent enough in a specific field or role. When young people are not aware of the need for a strategy to connect these dots/experiences for developing their career, they might end up feeling incompetent and unable where to continue further. This is mostly present in communities where economic difficulties are more recognised, so young people are obliged to find a job that will provide them with income, regardless of their professional development.

Another important aspect and which is considered as a challenge when it comes to career planning is knowing oneself. Very often young people are triggered to follow their friends and choose the same field of study/work and later they see that they are not being adapted or motivated about their chosen field of study/work. This is a consequence of lack of self-reflection and things that motivate them, as well as lack of practical and quality education that highlights their talents and skills ownership. It can be said with certainty that there is a high number of people that are talented and skilled in some other job while they work elsewhere because of their certified education on that field and non-recognition of their talents earlier.

Across the EU, people with disabilities are far less likely to be employed than people without disabilities. The barriers to quality employment add to the problem of poverty and social exclusion faced by people with disabilities. Barriers preventing access to the employment market are most of the times based on misconceptions and judgments on person’s abilities. (according to the Employment Policy of the European Disability Forum, 2022)

In our communities and among our beneficiaries, there are many young people disabilities who lack the employment and regular salary/income. With current situation of Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that due to different lockdown and/or social distancing measures, lots of employers have fired their employees, or are not having enough revenues to keep the employees sufficiently paid. We find ourselves still with higher unemployment rates and with lower economic level now (especially of our target groups) than before the pandemic measures started.

Developing educational approaches on career management is the core of this project. Using their past experiences with career planning and entrepreneurship education, the project partners are planning to develop new methods to address the needs and constrains of their target group – youth and young adults with different abilities.

Our project “Youth work for career management with different abilities’ youngsters” focuses on inclusion of young people with disabilities within the career/employment development, by promoting their sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, as well as increasing their employability and career planning and management skills, as well as digital capacity.

Even though career management seems very important for young people, there is still lack of awareness on this regard for a significant number of young people, especially those considered with fewer opportunities and young people with disabilities. Mainstream youth and those who live in big cities are way more informed about certain existing opportunities and attending different programmes that provide education for needed skills and capacities and validate their competences.

However, there is not always active promotion and opportunity offers to young people with fewer opportunities and young people with disabilities. These target groups are not approached enough by educational institutions and organisations working with career orientation topics. That results on still having quite a high percentage of youth with fewer opportunities unemployed and with lack of competences’ development on their jobs or job applications. In addition, persons with disabilities often face societal barriers and disability evokes negative perceptions and discrimination in many societies.

With this project, we want our beneficiaries, youth with disabilities, to improve their skills of career management, and we also aim to empower more youth workers for organising adequate career orientation, planning and development programmes, in line with the newest updates and cross-sectoral approach.

Project objectives:

  • Empower young people with disabilities for quality career management through development of inspiring, innovative, and up-to-date handbook, as well as the online course.
  • Empower our youth workers and improve knowledge management of our organisations for building competences of educators in career management for youth with disabilities, through LTTA, innovative curriculum and useful toolkit with workshops for beneficiaries.
  • Exchange good practices and further develop quality strategic partnership among partners from 5 European countries with different realities regarding career management possibilities and realities.

Motivation of partners in this project is to “equip” young adults with disabilities with set of skills needed to work on personal development in fields of career management and creating (self-)employment opportunities proactively in today’s reality of employment uncertainty and the world of extinction of many known jobs and occupation now and even more in the future. That new needed capacity are digital skills for (digital) employment, self-employment, or entrepreneurship – competence that can be trained and developed by gaining different skills, knowledge, attitudes through quality youth work and non-formal education.

Project activities are:

  • A1 – Project Management
  • M1 – Kick-off meeting
  • O1 Handbook “Exploring Youth work for career management with different abilities’ youngsters”
  • M2 – Second meeting
  • O2 – Curriculum “Empowering youth workers for quality youth work for career management with different abilities ‘youngsters”
  • M3 – Third meeting
  • O3 – Toolkit “Mentoring and supporting youngsters with different abilities for career planning and management”
  • M4 – Fourth meeting
  • O4 – E-learning course “Career planning and management course for youngsters with different abilities”
  • C1 – LTTA Training of trainers
  • E1, E2, E3, E4, E5 – Open conferences in RS, IT, HR, DE, BE
  • M5 – Final Evaluation meeting

Project results

 

Links to the careerDIF O4 Online courses in all 6 languages (DE, EN, IT, HR, RS, FR):

*Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.