Recent surveys show that the employment tax of VET learners in Europe is lower (72.9%) than the target of the European Commission (82%). These data is even worse in countries like Spain or Italy, with a high index of unemployment. As VET providers we are committed to facilitate our students’ transition to the labour market. Our schools are facing changes in the VET context where companies demand more skilled workers and students sometimes have a misperception of a labour market that is in constant change. Therefore, we need to help students to get an overall picture of their professional future in the labour market and prepare them for a successful career in retail by developing their soft skills. In order to reduce the gap between recruiters needs and students skills we decided to create a project that will foster students’ soft skills as a tool to improve their employability. VET providers are also facing another challenge: student dropouts. As schools, we have an important role to make VET studies attractive so that we become a first choice for our students and also we must contribute to fight dropouts. Developing real projects with companies and international partners helps us to offer an attractive learning environment for our students. Promoting projects that foster students skills and helping them to improve their employability creates a great impact on students lives. This project will promote active methodologies, student centered, where the student has a leading role in his learning, interviewing, analysing, using digital tools and being creative. Taking part in european projects also impacts on our teachers professional development enhancing their methodologies by sharing best practices with their european colleagues. Five countries are taking part in this project: Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia and Spain. We have previous experience working in an eTwinning project in 2017-18 and we want to continue our project reinforcing students skills in a european context. Every school will participate with a group of students (20-30 students in each group). During mobilities, 20 students will visit other partners and 1 or 2 teachers from each school will accompany the students. Every school has a project team of 2 up to 5 members who collaborate to coordinate the project activities and results. Our main objectives are: - Promote the retail heritage of our cities among students. - Develop students’ soft skills for a successful career in retail. Different activities have been planned for the 2 years of the project in order to develop the following soft skills for VET learners: European cultural awareness, digital competence, autonomy and initiative, social and civic competence, entrepreneurship, business awareness, communication skills, interpersonal skills and creativity. Finally, we would like to add that this project will help to reinforce teachers’ skills : - Interpersonal skills: teachers will be working in a multicultural context, developing activities for students from different countries. - Learning to learn: teachers will self-reflect on their own practices, implementing new methodologies such as entrepreneurial approaches or using games in education. The most relevant results of the project are: - A treasure hunt on emblematic shops of our cities to promote our retail heritage. - Videos of store owners hightlighting the skills needed to work in retail. - A leaflet about a route of sustainable commerces in our cities. - A self-evaluation grid on soft skills. - An Educational game to test students soft skills in different retail situations. - Results of a survey on the use of soft skills at the end of the project and six months later. Regarding the impact of the project, at a local level, our project will impact on our students, teachers, schools and local organisations that will help us to develop the project. The companies that we will visit and interview will realise that in schools we are already teaching and assessing soft skills and they will share their ideas on the skills that future professionals should perform. This project will connect companies and schools and we will all be able to learn from each other. Regarding the main output of the project, the Soft skills Educational game, it will be free of use and other schools and organisations will be able to download and use it as an educational tool to teach soft skills. At a regional level, we will share our project results with other schools as we all participate in different school networks and on the Etwinning Platform. At European and international level, we aim at helping our students to be active participants in European citizenship, tolerant and respectful towards other cultures, ways of thinking and life, who understand the different cultural values of nations so as to feel much closer to Europe.
During the 2017/18 academic year, five European VET institutes worked together on an eTwinning project. This collaboration led teachers who participated to share their concerns about the professional future of vocational training and education students at European level. The youth employment rates of VET graduates in Europe are below the target set by the European Commission (82%) and countries such as Spain and Italy have high youth unemployment rates. As VET providers, we are committed to making it easier for our students to transition into the job market. Our educational institutions face changes within the context of vocational education and training, as companies demand increasingly qualified workers and, more often than not, students have a mistaken perception of an ever-changing labour market. Furthermore, we face another challenge that is quite significant in countries such as France, Spain and Italy: early school leaving. As training centres, we therefore have a very important role in making VET studies more attractive so that they become our students’ first choice, thus contributing towards fighting early school leaving. Carrying out actual projects with international companies and partners helps us provide our students with an attractive learning environment. This project promoted the use of active student-centred methodologies where students played a leading role in their learning by conducting interviews, performing analyses, using digital tools and being creative. Being part of European projects also had an impact on the professional development of our teachers, improving their methodology upon sharing teaching practices with their European colleagues. Moreover, we need to help our students get a general picture of their professional future in the job market and prepare them by developing their soft skills or interpersonal skills for the workplace to ensure job success in the retail sector. Therefore, in order to bridge the gap between the needs of Human Resources departments and the skills of our students, we decided to carry out a project that would focus on the soft skills of our students to give them a key tool to boost their employability. Our main goals were: • To promote the iconic businesses in our cities among our students. • To develop the soft skills or interpersonal skills for the workplace of our students so that they can enjoy career success in the retail sector. Five countries were part of this project: Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia and Spain. We had prior experience working together and this helped us in establishing the lines of joint action and organising ourselves during the two years we worked on this joint project together. Each centre participated with a group of students (20–30 students per group). Among them, we had students with disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, students who were asylum seekers and students with special needs (one of them required the assistance of an assistant teacher during one of the LTTAs). The heterogeneity that internationality, parity and the different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of our participants brought made cohesion among the groups last over time with the help of social media. During the educational and training activities, 20 students visited other partners and 1 teacher from each centre accompanied the students. Each centre had a project team comprised of 2 to 5 members who collaborated and coordinated the project's activities and outcomes throughout the different phases we passed over the past two years. The LTTAs had the following blocks as the common thread: • Recognition, confidence-building activities among participants and organisation of international working groups. • Institutional welcome and presentation of the host centre as well as the participating centres. • Themed teaching/learning activities aimed at achieving the objectives set out for each LTTA. • Itineraries for the awareness of European culture through visits to iconic retailers in the host cities. • Presentation of the project findings to the public during the teaching/learning activity sessions. In addition, different activities were carried out over the past 2 years of the project to develop the following skills among our VET students: awareness of European culture, digital competence, autonomy and initiative, social and civic competences, entrepreneurship, business awareness, communication tools, interpersonal skills and creativity. Finally, we would like to add that this project helped to reinforce the teachers’ skills: • Interpersonal skills: the teachers involved in the project worked in a multicultural context, carrying out activities for students from different countries. • Learning to learn: the teachers were able to reflect on their own practices upon implementing new methodologies such as bringing entrepreneurship into the classrooms or gamifying learning. The most revealing outputs of this project were: • An educational game that can be found as a physical game and a web and mobile application for our students to learn—through the gamified way of learning—the use of interpersonal skills for the workplace in different situations that may arise while working in the sector. • A website, which contains the key outputs of our project including the two games: the downloadable physical game with a Creative Commons licence so it can be used by any school in Europe and access to the web/mobile app, which is particularly relevant now in the time of COVID-19, making gamified learning possible with proper social distancing. • Our freely accessible Twinspace, which provides access to the activities, posters, brochures and findings that can provide guidance to other centres that are in earlier phases of the project as well as provide guidance to educational institutions in terms of student awareness of soft skills. • A tour of the iconic shops in our cities to promote the cultural heritage related to historic retailers. Interviews of the shop owners, where the skills necessary to work in this sector have been highlighted. • A brochure on the itineraries for sustainable commerce in our cities. • A self-assessment rubric of soft skills and a poster that can be deployed in classrooms across Europe. • The results of project assessment from a survey. Regarding the main output of the project—the game on interpersonal skills for the workplace—, it can be freely used by other schools and organisations so they can download it and use it as an educational tool to teach and raise awareness of these skills. And its web/mobile app version makes it entirely accessible from anywhere on the planet, which is particularly relevant at this time when social distancing has been implementing across Europe as a measure to fight the pandemic. In terms of the project’s impact, at local level, our project had an impact on our students, teacher and schools, as well as the local organisations that helped us carry out the project. The companies we visited and interviewed realised that schools are already teaching and assessing soft skills, and so they shared their ideas on these skills that future professionals must have. This project brought together companies, shops and educational institutions, allowing them to learn from each other. At regional level, we shared the outcomes of the project with other schools as we participated in different educational and training centre networks, aside from the eTwinning platform. Over the course of this academic year and the coming ones, we will continue to refer to this project as workplace skills are demanded by the current European labour market. As the trend observed is that this will also remain true in the future, we will continue referring to the outputs of this project for a long time. At European and international level, we helped our students become active participants of European citizenship—tolerant and respectful of other cultures, ways of thinking and living, as well as understanding of the different cultural values of nations—, thus enabling them to feel closer to Europe. Lastly, it is worth pointing out that we hope to reap long-term benefits in terms of how our students for the coming years face and approach the labour market. This is because deploying the materials that are part of the outputs will affect their preparation and above all their level of awareness of workplace skills, which are absolutely crucial for their professional future.