GROWW - Getting Ready for the Opportunities in the World of Work apart from being the aim of each individual, one's personal goal to achieve growth and professional fulfillment either as employee or entrepreneur, is also a common venture . What counts is not just being a successful individual but how to personally contribute to a group, a team, the community, and be a useful team player. SINERGEE - Strategies and Initiatives, New in Education to Reinforce Grounding in Employability and Entrepreneurship ( including social entrepreneurship) will be focused on. Seven partners (Bulgaria, Finland, France, Italy, Roumania, Poland, Portugal ) will bring together their skills, knowledge and expertise to work towards what is today's school major task - to teach students (aged 15-20) to recognise and develop their potential as individuals and teammates and build up the right set of attitudes, skills and knowledge that can ensure their capability of being effective in the workplace to the benefit of themselves and society. The project was prompted by the need to combat low motivation and apathy at school, as well as anxiety about the future. This is a large project partnership as the coordinator believes it will facilitate the broadest range of perspectives, experiences and examples of good practices from different cultural backgrounds. We intend to apply innovation and exchange good practices in diverse learning based on working life needs. Throughout the two years the project lasts participating students will be engaged in activities that encourage learning by doing - they will collaborate, learn and train, search and investigate, examine, compare, prioritise and analyze, plan, organise, initiate, create, implement and evaluate with the strong involvement of their teachers, school management, parents and community. The development of the project will be based on a permanent communication between partners via social media, Twin Space , or face to face in six different international meetings and activities. Considering that the topic of the project is of great interest for partners and a European priority, we believe that it must be disseminated widely from the level of the partners’ institutions to the wide educational community by using various instruments such as mass media, project website, FB page and direct meetings. This project will identify effective practice using different evaluation methods for analyzing strengths and weaknesses in order to obtain a good practice partnership. The involved partner members will have precise tasks in accomplishing a user-friendly end products such as an e-journal, a website and multimedia short products made available electronically for the target and for the stakeholders in different European countries as a real added value for education.This two-year project represents one phase of a long-term goal devoted to the acquisition of specific life and intercultural skills and strategies, which will enable students to make better sense of the world they live in and their place in it.
The concept of this project GROWW-Get Ready for the Opportunities in the World of Work- evolved through work on а previous project on youth problems. Unemployment, Anxiety about the future, Ineffective education,Demotivation needed to be further tackled, the solutions to them sought in building up with students' confidence coming with competence and skills. The area of employability and entrepreneurship was waiting for us to be explored as it could help students develop an enormous array of skills necessary for the world of work. SINERGEE - Strategies and Initiatives, New in Education to Reinforce Grounding in Employability and Entrepreneurship ( including social entrepreneurship) was focused on. 7 partners (Bulgaria,Finland,France,Italy,Roumania,Poland,Portugal) brought together skills, knowledge and expertise to work towards what is today's school major task- teach students(aged 15-20) to recognise and develop their potential as individuals and teammates and build up the right set of attitudes,skills and knowledge that can ensure their capability of being effective in the workplace to the benefit of themselves and society. The fact that we focused on social entrepreneurship was both complementary and innovative. Feel about and act on social change was the truly challenging part of the project. The world of work develops globally and shares similar characteristics. Social problems exist everywhere and wait to be addressed. So there was a need to tackle these in view of active citizenship and social inclusion throughout the EU. The project comprised 3 stages: Employability: Activities focused on building up employability skills. Students learnt how to write a CV, a motivation letter, learnt about European certificates. They identified strengths and areas they needed to develop, learnt about the skills and traits most valued by employers, what brings job satisfaction, how to choose a profession, search for a job, strategies for job interviews. At the end of this stage, students were able to identify the areas they needed to develop, make an action plan; write a reference to recommend a partner for a position, a motivation letter. Where applicable there were summer placements – students recorded their use of skills and fulfilled a questionnaire. Entrepreneurship:There was an exchange of good practices. Students learnt about entrepreneurship with the active support of teachers, who were strongly involved at this stage by learning themselves more about entrepreneurship, facilitated by colleagues, next they developed teaching tools. Students learnt about the skills and traits of successful entrepreneurs. They visited small companies, studied strategies, methodology approaches, tools. Teams were formed to encompass more students making first steps in entrepreneurship by making business plans and setting up enterprise challenges. Social entrepreneurship: Studied the basics and compared with Business entrepreneurship. There were workshops on:what Social entrepreneurship is, who is a social entrepreneur, how to identify social opportunity, create a business model, identify the legal context, and social needs of a community, create a social change, outline ideas in a business plan to launch a social enterprise. All this was achieved through informal and non-formal learning: workshops, thought showering, discussions, research, presentations, group work, self-assessment, teamwork, drawing profiles, interviewing parents, community, recruitment agencies, preparing posters, role play, forums, inquiries and questionnaires, legwork, face to face meetings, discussions, roundtable, filming. Students remembered, understood, applied, compared, constructed, deconstructed, analyzed, reflected, evaluated, created. We shifted from theory to practice and learnt about and from other perspectives on shared challenges. We learnt through doing and relied on our resourcefulness. The strategies and approaches, as well as the final output, are definitely innovative. The ultimate product - an EEE Guide, supplemented with worksheets on developing employability and entrepreneurship was designed with a view to getting a serious impact on participants and target groups. The impact was on enhancing the following employability and entrepreneurial skills: communication, teamwork, responsibility, positive attitude, tolerance, critical thinking, resourcefulness, sensitivity to people's needs, time management, business awareness, research skills, problem-solving, confidence in self-expression, language and ICT skills. Students are, all in all, expected to have built up a wide spectre of personal and transferable skills, complementary to the set of employability, enterprising and entrepreneurial skills. Work with students outside the box stimulated our motivation to search for innovative and good practices and approaches and inspired us for lifelong learning. Sharing of good practices was useful for all partner schools and outside stakeholders.