The unemployement rate of youth in Europe is currently very high due to several factors, among them also the facts that the youth and youth workers struggle to understand and mainly present non-formal learning and volunteering as activities building soft skills which are important for labour market and labour market lacks awareness and acceptance of volunteering as source of competencies and experience of their young job candidates. Therefore the project “Youth Employability via Volunteering” is focusing on increasing employability of young people by raising acknowledgement of competences gained through volunteering. The project targets around 1.300 youth/volunteers and youth workers directly (over 30.000 young people indirectly) and cca 30 representatives of labour market (employers, labour offices) by following activities: - networking among all project stakeholders, - researching in-depth the current status on labour market in regard to volunteering and its acceptance, - joint collaboration on upgrade of innovative competences tracking application IM-PROVE linking it with other existing tools such as Europass and Youthpass and their acknowledgement and usage by all three target groups (volunteers, youth workers and labour market), - capacitating youth workers to use such self-reflection/tracking tools as part of their daily work and providing them with easy to use e-handbook on how to do so and by dissemination activities promoting the project findings and results. The project is envisaged as sort of pilot activity, building on already existing partnerships and targeting interested stakeholders with the long-term plan to multiply similar activities in other european countries through partners network of The Alliance of European Voluntary Service Organisations and other international networks and national partner organisations to create wider pan-european dimension but not losing the important regional relevance.
The unemployement rate of youth in Europe was in the time when this project was shaped very urgent issue. It was connected with the fact that the youth and youth workers struggled to understand and mainly present non-formal learning and volunteering as activities building soft skills which are important for labour market and labour market lacked awareness and acceptance of volunteering as source of competencies and experience of their young job candidates. Therefore the project “Youth Employability via Volunteering” was focusing on increasing employability of young people by raising acknowledgement of competences gained through volunteering. The project targeted young volunteers, youth workers and also representatives of labour market (mainly companies, but also labour offices) by following activities: - networking among all project stakeholders, - researching in-depth the current status of how the labour market perceives volunteering - results available at https://www.inexsda.cz/docs/volunteering-and-labour-market-research-youth-employability-via-volunteering.pdf - joint collaboration on upgrade of innovative competences tracking application IM-PROVE linking it with other existing tools such as Europass and Youthpass and their acknowledgement and usage by all three target groups (volunteers, youth workers and labour market) - available at improve.inexsda.cz and in App Store (iOS) and Play Store (Android) - capacitating youth workers to use such self-reflection/tracking tools as part of their daily work and providing them with easy to use e-handbook on how to do so - available at handbook.inexsda.cz The project was realised by INEX-SDA (Czech Republic) together with Zavod Voluntariat (Slovenia) and Solidarités Jeunesses (France), organisations, which work together more than a decade on various projects concerning volunteering, non-formal education, employability issues and global learning. The project was also envisaged to target interested stakeholders in respective countries (civil service, ministries, companies, youth organisations, other NGOs working with youth and volunteering…) whom we cooperated with and / or presented the results of the project and discussed about further cooperation.