CONTEXT, BACKGROUND, NEEDS ADDRESSED: School life is a special, sealed envelope; with particular rules and laws. Pupils learn how to reach settled aims, how to produce achievements, how to meet expectations, and how to be aligned with instructions. They are happy to get good math marks, they are hand-working to learn literary works, they like to be outstanding at school carnivals and they love to be loved by their teachers and school mates. They get used to mothers' praise at home when they provide good marks. They learn how to write final thesis topics and how to prepare for special exams. The shock comes when they first leave the school gates. They face the fact that most of the knowledge they learnt at school are not useful for new expectations they are in front of. There are different rules out there, and nobody cares about their math marks. The lack of perspectives in school life is one of the most demotivating factors in education. It would be crucial to show off aims and results of learning process which lead somewhere reliable to real life, employability and labour market. Otherwise attending to a school is only a plus task for most of the students. The project first of all tries to make all participants (teachers and pupils at the same time) to realize the existing gap between educational studies and the world of work. It introduces the feature of the present job market, the most common job types, and collects the difficulties of finding a job. During various activities it raises consiousness about participants' valuable attitudes, skills, which can be used in creating personal futures. It teaches self-identification and self-management techniques; lists methods of writing a resumeé, and models basic attitudes on a job-interview with exciting role-games. It also generates group workshops to model how to build a cooperation with mates. Forms the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation, motivates to plan start-up ideas and to learn how to work with basic elements and roles of a small enterprise. With the help of students' mobility actions, it also presents to build future plans with crossing borders - realizing the difference on a more global thinking. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: According to these needs mentioned above, the project aims to: - Realizing the gap between school educaton content and competences required in the world of work. Identifying the feature of the recent global labour market, defining skills and competences generally needed for it. - Providing a specified training session which help to recognize own personal values, strength, advanced skills and competences for a more successfull orientation in the labour market. Identifying connection between personalities, educational results and the feature of labour market. Providing self-identification and self-management techniques in order to raise self-awareness of pupils' personal identity. - Raising awareness on importance of transversal skills development as a lifelong learning process - Investigating ways of labour market applications. Learning to write different types of resumeé. Modelling possible job interview situations and attitudes with TIE role games. - Raising the spirit of entrepreneurship with examining the possibilities of self-employment status. (What to do if you feel you don’t fit to the general expectations? Find your valuable attitudes and create your own future!) Providing information about basic spirits, skills of entrepreneurs with invited lecturers. Collecting and generating start-up ideas, modelling their fictive operation with the help of mentors. STRUCTURE, METHODS: There are four main topic issues for each semester: 1. The (global) labour market. (HR level). Identification, featuring, outlining problems and context. 2. Who are you? (Personal level). Orientation based on precise self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Defining personal skills and competences. 3: How to match your skills and personality with the labour market? (Operative level) Resumé writing, job interviews 4: Design your future based on your personal skills! (Entrepreneur level) Start-up ideas and future plans. The partnership uses formal, nonformal and informal teaching methods to reach the results: thematic-based workshops, lectures of invited experts and entrepreneurs, TIE role games, research, mentoring and job-interview simulations will be applied during the itinerary. The project contains two joint-staff event and one student exchange, and it provides 3 main publications summerizing results, conclusions and introducing main methodologies used. All these activities increase pupils'motivation for learning, improve their basic and transversial competences, decrease disparities of disadvantaged learners, and prepare more effectively for labour market requirements. The itinerary is based on intercultural dialogue between participants. 4 schools participate in it.
While at school our students are protected from the outside world. They just need to go with the flow and do their best to finish compulsory school successfully. However, when they leave school or university they are faced with their first life challenge: being able to find their first job. Bearing this in mind, it is rather important to provide our students with useful tools which will definitely be helpful when the time comes to find the most suitable job for each one of them. Therefore, this project "The World of Work - Preparing for Real Life Adventures in School Education" aims at helping young adults to achieve their professional goals by getting to know the current labour market in the three partner countries: in Bulgaria, Hungary and Portugal; by becoming aware of their strengths and weaknesses; and by becoming acquainted with active job search techniques and entrepreneurship. Throughout the project, and as expected, there were four Transnational Project Meetings and three Learning, Teaching and Training Activities: two Short-term joint staff training events and a Short-term exchange of groups of pupils. On the whole, the no. of teachers who participated in the TPM was fifteen, in the LTT Activities there were eighteen teachers, and in the LTT Activities for students there were thirty. During the two years around thirty teachers and around five hundred students were involved in the different activities. The teachers that engaged in the project were highly motivated to contribute with their expertise. The students, on the other hand, were secondary school students, from regular or vocational education, as they were the main target subjects of the whole project. To start with, it was important to find out the secondary school students' expectations when leaving school by answering a questionnaire. The results of this questionnaire show what the older students from the three partner schools intend to do when they finish school, what difficulties they expect when looking for their first job, how much they expect to earn, among others. In the International Study on Labour Market created by the Portuguese team there are also the results of the focus groups research on the features of each country's labour market, in which there is a comparison between the data collected from the three partner schools regarding the following topics: each country's population; no. of young people aged between 18 and 30 years old; unemployment rate between 18-30 years old; jobs/courses with the highest and lowest employment rate; unemployed education level; employed according to their level of education; and youth emigration. By checking this International Study on Labour Market our students can find valuable information that might help them tread a fruitful path. Then, it was time to move on to a personal level by attending TIE – Theater in Education workshops, which consisted in TIE role games aimed at students‘ self-knowledge and self-consciousness, i.e. getting to know one‘s strengths, weaknesses and personal skills and competences. As a result, the Bulgarian team produced a Methodology Book on these TIE workshops. At the same time, the 12th form Portuguese students attended information sessions performed by a psychologist, a sociologist and a representative of the job center. Both the psychologist and the sociologist dealt with the personal development, i.e. the self-consciousness. In order to know their own strengths and weaknesses better, the students were asked to fill in a questionnaire by Myers Briggs. After finding out the results of this self-knowledge tool, the students got to know what type of person they are and what they will be like in a future job scenario. Besides, a few suggestions were also given so that they could take advantage of their strengths and weaknesses, not only in their personal life, but also in the labour market. On the other hand, the representative of the job center focused on active job search techniques, which the Hungarian team worked on and created a booklet. This Booklet on Job Searching Techniques is a useful tool when looking for a job as it contains, step by step, the necessary information to accomplish this goal. Finally, at the Learning, Teaching, Training Activities: Short-term exchange of groups of pupils that took place at the Portuguese school, the thirty students, who attended this meeting, had the chance to develop their entrepreneurship skills in order to start designing their own future by setting up Start-up ideas. The end products produced by the three partner countries can be useful tools to prepare our secondary students for their future real life adventures outside the school gates, whether they go to university or join the labour market after leaving school.