The project „Vocational guidance and life planning in a reality in motion“ adresses all those who cooperate in order to prepare young people for their vocational training or academic studies. Those parties are: teachers, students, parents, lower and upper secondary schools and further institutions concerned with vocational preparation. Today these factions play a mayor role since at present especially in the South and East of Europe our European Community is struck by an alarming economic crisis and highly increasing unemployment rates. The educational measures for vocational guidance taken so far seem to be insufficient to meet this challenge. Therefore in a first step we will take stock of these measures. We will compare the situation within Europe with regard to vocational councelling in schools and the opening of the European labour market. We will find possible convergencies and divergencies as to the job situation of young graduates. We intend to further the teachers´ competences to effectively prepare young people for training maturity. The young people get the chance to become aware of their individual strengths. We intend to instigate a mutual exchange of experiences and information about vocational guidance and councelling of young people. And we aim at developing more efficient and needs-oriented ways for supporting students systematically and individually, for procuring guidance for their professional life and for preventing early school-leaving. In order to build on their strenghts students should gain an insight into our globalised working world. Thus the students will visit firms which are innovative, future-oriented and typicall for the particular countries. Furthermore we will encourage them to imagine their future life in a new and moving reality.All methods and results, developed from an intra-European cooperation of students, teachers, parents, firms and other institutions, will be maintained in written records as a booklet as well as an e-book. The materials can be used for vocational councelling in all schools.In addition we will conclude the project with the creation of a Portfolio for Vocational Orientation as a complement to the Europass and the ECVET (European Credit System for Vocational Education and Training). This portfolio can be applied in lower and upper secondary level schools throughout Europe. The students can benefit from this didactic device as a life-long record for all experiences related to life planning and vocational orientation. They thereby reflect their particular interests and strengths, their skills development related to their educational and occupational biography. They strengthen their degree of self-responsibility and self-organisation and they actively shape their professional biography. The porfolio also serves as a means to structure and record the individual process of career orientation.As a first step the participating schools introduce to each other examples of „good practice“, vocational guidance and councelling at their school and in their country. Next they compare the educational systems - their educational structure and supply - related to vocational guidance and councelling. Furthermore the participating countries present their vocational training system in connection with vocational schools. We also examine the role of trade unions in various training courses. Another important focus of our project are the topics youth unemployment, the right to work and the measures taken in the various educational systems of the participating countries. We want the students to recognize the economical growth of their countries, to realize and to take advantage of the innovative possibilities and their benefits related to the global system. Perhaps this is a way to remedy the „open wound“ caused by migration and painfully experienced by the countries of quite some participating schools. We will also examine in detail academic education and compare the academic paths in which students of the participating countries are directed. The students take part in a day work placement in every participating country.Besides the didactic instruments we suggest a further method to all participants, resulting from the direct experience of the mode of operation in the respective countries. The students will relate their mental image of their dream job to labour market needs. Furthermore we will examine the educational standards of secondary schools in relation to the requirements for young people embarking on their professional careers. All six participating schools are evenly geografically distributed all-over Europe and the inventory of educational measures in the correspondent countries will reflect a representative picture of the current situation. The coordinators of the project and their institutions are alr
Two secondary schools from Germany and Greece and three secondary schools with sixth form from Lithuania, Slovakia and Turkey took part in this project. Project activities of the student groups went as planned. The short-term exchanges of pupils were the main focus of the meetings. The planned objectives for the project meetings were mostly met The preparation for the short-term exchanges went according to the application. The project meetings were intended to practise the professional orientation of each participating country. The workshops took place in traditional communities of the participating countries. The students were even able to work, discuss and exchange their opinions with their fellow countrymen abroad. The European added value lies in the students` realisation of the open European job market and its demand for them, with the possibility for them to work in other European countries after the completion of their studies. For the first exchange in Greece the students prepared topic presentations about career orientation in their education systems. Apart from that they dealt with their own families’ professional CVs and professional CVs of former students from their school. The presentations and video films were prepared with this aim in mind and presented to the partners in the hosting school. Those presentations formed the basis for the opinion exchange that followed after. The preparations for the second short-exchange in Lithuania went according to plan. The students worked on the topic of ‘The most and least popular occupation in your country‘. Besides that the students also filled in a psychological test for the choice of occupation that is regularly used in the Lithuanian school. It was administered to two classes and subsequently evaluated. The third hosting institution was the German school. The main topics were: ‘Vocational schools and the German dual system of education’ that is unique in Europe. The hosting students presented the types of vocational schools in their country. The German students presented ‘The Dual system of education’, ‘Dual studies’, and ‘Vocational education in the State of Hesse’. The fourth short-stay exchange took place in Slovakia. The subject of this meeting was presentations about the possibilities of college studies not only in their homeland but also abroad. The students visited the oldest universities in Slovakia and Austria. The differences were discussed and compared, including the scope of learning opportunities, college-admission requirements, domestic and foreign studies. The fifth exchange took place in Turkey. The focal point was the topic ‘occupations in tourism’. All the participating groups prepared presentations of occupations typical for the travel industry and the tourist landmarks in their country. The students presented many options for tourism studies in different universities.The planned photo exhibitions did not take place because the photos were integrated within the presentations. All the project`s presentations were published on the conjoint project`s homepage, http://jjanonis.su.lt/erasmus/, which is made available to all the participants. There are also all the photographs, films, certificates of almost all of the visited institutions, and programmes available on this website. The project participants did not go ahead with the idea of having a printed brochure. This was, instead, to be realised as a portfolio only in digital form. Its layout was discussed extensively during the meetings. It was agreed that the conjoint outcome of the project would be a portfolio in a form of a digital App. A German school student was entrusted with its preparation. The idea of the ‘App’ was born because the portfolio should be modern, and most European students own a smart-phone, that serves him/her as a small office, so s/he is able to use this app. This app contains an occupational orientation of a student during his studies, complete with the project activities and description of the vocational school systems. A link to the final product of the project is attached to this final report. Working days in hosting schools were not done according to the plan. The students and teachers participated in workshops and visited a variety of traditional companies and enterprises in the hosting countries instead. They also joined seminars. The European added value lies in bringing the students closer to the European job market in conjunction with the vocational preparation. The innovative part of this project was the students`opportunity to meet in other European countries, become acquainted with traditional enterprises, occupations, vocational schools, universities, traditional crafts, and they also had the opportunity to widen their horizons. The idea of the app itself is also innovative because, after some adjustments, it could be used across the whole Europe.