The applicant has devised and piloted an Enterprise and Employability programme which is complementary to KA1 VET work placements in foreign organisations. We now wish to share and improve the programme with the help of a network of European VET partners, working together towards achieving transparency and recognition of skills and qualifications to facilitate learning, employability and labour mobility.Our Enterprise and Employability programme comes to complement the KA1 VET mobility schemes, and adds value to it by offering a training scheme that equips and empowers beneficiaries of such schemes with entrepreneurship and employability knowledge and skills, leading to sustainable employment at the end of the mobility. The training programme is designed to work in symbiosis with the work placement, allowing the students to record both their professional and personal goals through the use of the Individual Development Plan and Log Books that are complementary to the training.The proposal builds on the UK approach to student-centred learning, offering an innovative pedagogical approach to partner nations. The curriculum materials will offer a formal training route, and opportunities for national and ECVET certification will be explored. The enterprise and employability programme that we wish to share, improve and standardise is based on an empirical approach, offering immediate solutions to engage employers in work-based learning and to help beneficiaries of mobility schemes into sustainable employment. The tangible results of the project will also lead to the development of better quality assurance mechanisms in VET, by identifying clear statements of learning outcomes.We will work together to bring in good/better practices, improve the materials of the Enterprise and Employability programme and standardise it, with inputs from 11 partners representing 5 EU countries. We are all seeking to enhance the “boost to employability” through an employability/enterprise curriculum that is offered during the mobility. We want to design the most appropriate curriculum and pedagogy, using the knowledge of all the partners. We acknowledge the different pedagogical approaches of partners/nations, yet also seek to be uniform in our approach.The impact will be that we develop a common curriculum which we all own – both as intellectual property and “own” in terms of our commitment to its quality delivery. The main target groups will be the VET students and the staff of the partner organisations, which will benefit directly from the developments of the project.The current proposal will build and strengthen a network of European VET providers, enabling them to deliver a standardised enterprise and employability curriculum, build organisational capacity and collaboratively work towards achieving results that tackle EU's 2020 Strategy.
Since the advent of the Erasmus+ Programme, Gecko (UK) has devised and piloted an Enterprise and Employability programme which is complementary to KA1 VET work placements in foreign organisations. Throughout the lifetime of the project, this programme was shared and improved with the help of a network of European VET partners, working together towards achieving transparency and recognition of skills and qualifications to facilitate learning, employability and labour mobility. The organisations involved were: Gecko (UK), Reattiva, CEDIT & CPA Bomba (Italy), INCOMA & INTEGRA (Spain), Globtrain (Germany) and European Academy (Romania). Our now improved DEEM programme complements the KA1 VET mobility schemes, and adds value to them by offering a training scheme that equips and empowers beneficiaries of such schemes with entrepreneurship and employability knowledge and skills, leading to sustainable employment at the end of the mobility. The improved materials take the shape of: - 1 Workbook on Digital Competencies - 1 Workbook on Digital Competencies - Tutor's Copy - 1 Workbook on Intrapreneurship - 1 Workbook on Intrapreneurship - Tutor's Copy - 1 Workbook on Teambuilding - 1 Workbook on Teambuilding - Tutor's Copy Together with: - Methodological notes - 1 Improved Individual Development Plan - 1 Improved Log Book The training programme has been designed to work in symbiosis with the work placement, allowing the students to record both their professional and personal goals through the use of the Individual Development Plan and Log Books that are complementary to the training.The project built on the UK approach to student-centred learning, offering an innovative pedagogical approach to partner nations. The curriculum materials offer a formal training route, and opportunities for national and ECVET certification. The DEEM programme that we devised is based on an empirical approach, offering immediate solutions to engage employers in work-based learning and to help beneficiaries of mobility schemes into sustainable employment. Through implementing the project, the partnership also led to the development of better quality assurance mechanisms in VET, by identifying clear statements of learning outcomes.We worked together in sharing good/better practices, improving the materials of the Enterprise and Employability programme and then standardised them, with inputs from all the partners representing 5 EU countries. By using the knowledge of all the partners, we acknowledged the different pedagogical approaches of partners/nations, but also sought to be uniform in our approach, so that the DEEM programme can be used or adopted in any EU nation. The main result of the project: the DEEM network developed a common curriculum which we all own now – both as intellectual property and “own” in terms of our commitment to its quality delivery. The project built and strengthened a network of European VET providers, enabling them to deliver a standardised enterprise and employability curriculum, building organisational capacity, whilst working collaboratively towards achieving results that tackle EU's 2020 Strategy.