The motivation to launch a project on career guidance lies in individual self-assessments of practices carried out at all partner schools. All schools consider the career guidance practices on offer insufficient and often provided too late to fully meet the needs of our students. The German school took the initiative to find partners for such a project on the eTwinning platform and received an incredibly high number of applications from interested schools all over Europe, a fact that proves the high relevance of this project. Six schools from Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy, United Kingdom and Slovenia eventually teamed up to jointly work out the proposal for the project "EUJOMA - Our own virtual EUropean JOb MArket". Depending on the school systems of the six participating countries the schools are labelled primary, middle or secondary schools. To ensure peer support and learning despite the different circumstances the activities were tailored for the youngest respectively for the oldest students in grades 9 and 10 of the partner schools. With the creation of "EUJOMA - Our own virtual EUropean JOb MArket" a framework will be provided to get students in all partner schools active in identifying jobs that could be of interest for their peers from the other participating schools, in publishing two carefully elaborated job offers per school, in applying for one of the jobs on offer and going through practical and realistic application procedures. The two successful applicants for the jobs offered by the German school will get a chance to do a 3-day job experience at the company or workshop that the school cooperated with when preparing the job offer. This framework and the activities embedded in it were developed with the aim of meeting in a practically-oriented way the objectives and the rationale of our project which are geared towards reaching benchmarks set by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation in their report “Good Career Guidance” (2014) This report analyses the provisions on offer in schools in the UK, compares them to provisions in European countries like Finland and Germany et.al., and defines benchmarks identifying different dimensions of good career guidance. In short, the benchmarks ask for : - A stable careers programme that is known and understood by all players at school level and employers - Learning from career and labour market information; access to good quality information and support to make the best use of the information - Addressing the needs of each pupil; equality and diversity considerations should be embedded in the programme throughout - Linking curriculum learning to careers, the relevance of STEM subjects should be highlighted - Encounters with employers and employees - Experiences of workplaces - Encounters with further and higher education - Personal guidance. We aim at reaching these benchmarks by implementing them in practice in the framework of our own virtual European Job Market in order to gather experience and to develop custom-made career guidance strategies for each school. Project results will not only be used in participating schools but they are meant to also have an impact on other school and non-school target groups: Students and teachers not directly involved in the project shall be reached to incite their interest in activities realized thanks to "EUJOMA", to raise awareness of opportunities and of didactic results. Teachers can adapt their own education methodology to include the innovations, especially regarding the conceptual approach. Stakeholders and especially employers are another very important target group for dissemination. The participating schools will be in very close contact with employers when students prepare job offers for advertising them on the EUJOMA platform. This contact is of particular relevance in countries where apprenticeship schemes are implemented as guidance is needed even more to address learning and organisational issues among both learners and enterprises. In the case of Germany, many craft businesses are in dire need of young people who are in good academic standing to qualify for a training. For schools, students and employers it will have very beneficial effects when education and career guidance schemes are matched with local companies' needs thus allowing for a smooth transition from school to a vocational training. Local and national institutions are also among the target groups to be addressed as policy makers will be needed to implement innovative learning paths, student-oriented education and career guidance which also takes into account labour-market needs and other concepts on a local, regional or national scale. The active participation of all the relevant stakeholders is crucial and will still be in the long term when trying to install sustainable guidance systems which contribute to enhancing the employability of young people, reducing early school leaving and tackling youth unemployment.
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