CONTEXT and BACKGROUND Higher education (HE) is considered to ensure employment and long careers. In its Higher Education Agenda, the EU highlights the importance of increasing the number of HE graduates to 40% and places HE at the centre of Innovation, job creation, competitiveness and sustainability. Despite the current success, there are trends risking the positive outcomes, the educational ROI at social, financial and innovation level. Unemployment and underemployment among HE graduates, fragmented work careers and employment have increased in the EU during the past decade, distributing unevenly among educational sectors, countries, and origins of HE graduates creating groups most at risk. Long-term unemployment increases difficulties of HE graduates to return to work and hence social exclusion. Poorer employment opportunities drive HE graduates to fragmented and short-term employments, low-skilled jobs, emigration and brain-drain. Absence from graduate work causes lack of work experience, skill mismatch and loss of taught skills. At the same time, the changes in work life and the new requirements for competencies of Work 4.0 further create challenges to return and/or enter to work life, such as - Unpredictability, fragmentation and fluidity of future work life, digitalisation replacing people - Need of non-cognitive skills and competencies, e.g. problem solving, creativity, readiness for change, people skills, design competencies. In order to achieve the goals of the EU policies for education, innovation, it is crucial to re-integrate and re-skill also the unemployed and underemployed HE graduates to work life with solutions that will enable their successful entrance or return to work, and mastering competencies for Work 4.0. Yet, these subjects have largely been overlooked and the current HE and employment training offer is mainly focused on discipline-based competencies, hardly addressing Work 4.0 competencies. OBJECTIVE and OUTCOMES Reboot project aims to increase the employability potential of the unemployed and underemployed HE graduates by upskilling and developing relevant and high quality skills and competencies for Work 4.0 in 5 future-oriented and sector-agnostic competence clusters, their ability to recognise and demonstrate these skills, and their change readiness. The vehicle will be an online non-formal training programme with a skill-competence testing tool especially targeted towards unemployed and underemployed HE graduates. The noticeable national differences in the partner countries’ HE unemployment and underemployment realities will assist to create a holistic picture of the situation at the uropean level taking into account all the most important perspectives. This will facilitate creating a Pan-European approach that any country can apply according to their current national context. The main outcomes of the project will be: O1: Validation of Reboot Competency Clusters for Work 4.0 O2: Reboot Online Training Programme O3: Reboot Competence Self-testing Tool O4: Handbooks for Implementing Reboot Training: Reboot Pilot Course, and Training of Trainers METHODOLOGY The Reboot project will apply target group and stakeholder surveys, desk research and comparative analysis in competence and training analysis and verification, and participatory, design, product development methods, piloting and observation in the development of the Reboot online training programme, self-test and handbooks for the users. NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS The primary target group of Reboot will be European unemployed and underemployed HE graduates, with a special attention on groups at risk: young graduates, women who have taken parent leave, employees over 45 who have been made redundant, and (young EU) migrants. The secondary target group will be HEI and career counsellors, C-VET and unemployment training organisers, unemployment offices, HEI professors and teachers, key-actors in HRM and employment areas. Reboot is expected to involve or reach circa 16000 representatives of target groups and stakeholders in the project activities from development and to dissemination, of which as direct participants in intellectual outputs, circa 120 unemployed and underemployed HE graduates, 120 employment organisations, and 100 stakeholders represented by employing organisations. ENVISAGED IMPACT AND LONG-TERM BENEFITS Increased understanding and knowledge of Work 4.0 competencies, the perceptual differencies of them among different groups, and about employment training needs and realities of the unemployed and underemployed HE graduates. - Unemployed and underemployed HE graduates: increased mastering, awareness and ability to demonstrate of own Work 4.0 competencies, and increased abilities for career flexibility. - Employment organisations: obtaining cutting-edge training material to support unemployed and underemployed HE graduates in developing Work 4.0 related competencies and their career flexibility.
Unemployment and underemployment among higher education (HE) graduates, fragmented work careers and employment have increased in the EU during the past decade. Poorer employment opportunities increase their difficulties to return to work, and drive them to fragmented and short-term employments, low-skilled jobs, emigration and brain-drain. Absence from graduate work causes lack of work experience, skill mismatch and loss of taught skills. Focusing on hard skills is not enough to boost employability of HE graduates as the changes in work life, such as unpredictability, fragmentation and fluidity of future work and digitalisation replacing people, and the new requirements for non-cognitive skills and competencies of Work 4.0 create further situations and challenges. There is currently a gap between what employers want and what higher education graduates offer to them. The Reboot project addressed this challenge by developing training for unemployed and underemployed higher education graduates which focuses on upskilling and developing relevant and high-quality sector-agnostic soft skills and competencies for Work 4.0, their ability to recognise and showcase these skills to potential employers using, for instance, portfolios, to productising own skills, soft skills and experiences, and in increasing career and skills flexibility of the unemployed and underemployed HE graduates and hence their change readiness and sense of empowerment over own career. Reboot self-test on soft skills helps to measure the level of understanding and mastering of soft skills at the beginning and end of the training, firstly to measure the level and hence obtaining guidelines for the training focus, and secondly to measure own development during the training. Reboot training is formed of six modules and 22 soft skills: - M0. Introduction to soft skills - M1. About Me-How I Work - M2. Context-How We Work - M3. Into Action-Get to Work! - M4. Career and skills flexibility - M5. Portfolio creation Reboot training is online non-formal training which can be delivered also as blended or online trainer-led activity or as self-learning independent of time and place. Hence the secondary target group is HEI and career counsellors, C-VET and unemployment training organisers, unemployment offices, HEI professors and teachers, key-actors in HRM and employment areas., i.e. employment trainers and facilitators, who can implement training. Reboot handbooks for higher education graduates and trainers support implementing Reboot training. The training is suitable to all unemployed and underemployed HE graduates regardless the sector, level of work experience or nationality. The training was developed by four partners coming from countries with different employment realities, Belgium, Finland, Greece and the UK which supports the Pan-European adaptability. The development of the training, self-test and the handbooks benefits from the research and the Validation of Reboot Competency Clusters for Work 4.0. All the training materials, the research report and handbook and syllabus are freely available on the Reboot Online Training platform at http://reboot-project.eu/ in respective content and language sections. The Reboot training was piloted with 51 underemployed and unemployed higher education graduated and 14 trainers and facilitators (target group 2) combined of national participants. The feedback from the participants was positive. The training satisfied the need and concern of most participants about soft-skill development: module 1 - 86,6%, Module 2 - 87,2% Module 3 - 92,2%, and career and skills flexibility 90,1% satisfaction. The trainers were especially happy with the self-test and the materials. The learners also reported that training was found a new method to look at and showcase own skills. They discovered new things about themselves and gained self-confidence and sense of empowerment. The project involved target groups and stakeholders actively in other activities as well, such as concept testing, hence involving directly 694 people: 376 un/underemployed HE graduates, 175 trainers and facilitators, 130 representatives of work life and 13 stakeholders. Through dissemination activities the project reached circa 46.000 people. ENVISAGED IMPACT AND LONG-TERM BENEFITS Based on the positive outcomes, it can be concluded that the Reboot training is useful for increasing detecting, mastering and showcasing of Work 4.0 oriented soft skills and competences, productisation own skills and for career and skills flexibility, and hence empowerment over one’s career, and hence has potential to increase their employability potential. It also provides cutting-edge training material to support unemployed and underemployed HE graduates in this process. As the materials are freely available online, in the future, more unemployed and underemployed higher education graduates are expected to receive help for their employability.