The Soft skills project aims at assisting low skilled people and people will disabilities to access employment thanks to the enhancement of behavioural skills. The European Commission works with EU countries to strengthen the common framework of key competences, in other words knowledges, skills and behaviours that will help the learners in their personal fulfilment and, later, in their job search and participation in civil society. These key competences consist of ‘traditional’ and ‘horizontal’ skills. At a time when the world of work is changing profoundly and the global economy is not creating a sufficient number of jobs, there is a growing emphasis on those ‘horizontal’ skills. Indeed, employers want their new employees to have both good interpersonal and technical skills. Those “soft” skills are human skills, personality traits and know-how-to-be. In this context, the development of soft skills is particularly important to empower low-skilled people and people with disabilities to face future challenges. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of investing in the integration of low-skilled people, it is necessary to help them in developing an individual life project. The flexibility of training models could serve as a starting point for the activation needed for lifelong learning and studying, and for developing skills in the areas of communication, responsibility, autonomy (Oliviera &Frazäo, 2002). Appropriate policy and programmes exist, but they have not yet achieved their goals. In their current form, the vocational training and related activities, based on a formal training organization, do not meet the expectations of people with low level of qualification who often do not have access to formal training. Therefore, it is essential to develop a new vision of vocational training and to connect it with the ‘soft skills’ acquisition. The aim of the Soft skills project relies on the creation of a shared method and educational tools at the European level, dedicated to vocational trainers and technical supervisors/tutors for on-the-job training. The project relies both on the European ECVET system and on the pedagogical approaches of alternative education, as well as on the partner’s learning experience in the workplace. 14 technical supervisors or trainers from partner organisations will be trained to the developed soft skills method. Then they will themselves train around 100 low-skilled people and people with disabilities. In order to approve the co-development of the training modules, 2 different training modules will be experienced twice on a shared-basis in a partner country. The methodology of the project implementation will be based on the involvement of all partner countries in each activity. Firstly, partner organisations will cooperate with associate partners to develop the European catalogue of soft skills references that will describe a list of behavioural skills in link with learning approaches of alternative education. Secondly, the project’s partners will create a soft skills training toolbox, based on each of the selected learning methods. Trainers and supervisors/tutors from the different partner countries will then be trained in order to experience the developed training tools and programmes on a local scale. Finally, during the last phase of the project, the effects and impacts for trainers, supervisors/tutors but also for our target audience will be assessed. In the short term, the main expected impact of the project is to transfer soft skills to people with low level of qualification and with disabilities. The project will also impact vocational trainers, who will implement the training and will in the long term develop new learning methods and forms of evaluation. Finally, the Soft skills project will help integrate low-skilled and disabled people into the labour market thanks to the development of soft skills.
The Erasmus+ Soft skills project is part of an approach that facilitates access to soft skills for people with low levels of qualification in order to accelerate their professional integration. Indeed, mastering a professional activity does not only suppose the implementation of technical skills specific to the job (hard skills), it also relies on the mobilization of soft skills. To this end, the partnership has developed a method as well as pedagogical tools for the training and the evaluation of soft skills. The European Commission works with EU countries to strengthen the common framework of key competences, in other words knowledges, skills and behaviours that will help the learners in their personal fulfilment and, later, in their job search and participation in civil society. These key competences consist of ‘traditional’ and ‘horizontal’ skills. At a time when the world of work is changing profoundly and the global economy is not creating a sufficient number of jobs, there is a growing emphasis on those ‘horizontal’ skills. Indeed, employers want their new employees to have both good interpersonal and technical skills. Those “soft” skills are human skills, personality traits and know-how-to-be. In this context, the development of "soft skills" is particularly important to enable people with low qualifications or disabilities to meet future challenges. In its current form, vocational training, based on a formal organization, does not meet the expectations of people with low levels of qualification who often do not have access to formal training. It is therefore essential to develop a new vision of training and to add the acquisition of "soft skills". This is the goal we had when developing this Erasmus + Soft skills project. Our main objectives were the followed one - to associate soft skills and appropriate pedagogical approaches of alternative education and personal development, - to create pedagogical tools for technical supervisors and people with low qualifications or in a handicap situation - work on soft skills evaluation methods 9 European partners active in the field of vocational training and coming from France, Belgium, Spain, Austria and Slovenia wanted to respond to these objectives and together they co-constructed innovative solutions to make soft skills accessible to people with a low level of qualification and/or in a situation of disability. For example, the following were created - The European catalog of soft skills references which gives an overview of the soft skills approach followed by the project: it contains the list of soft skills defined within the framework of the project, the levels of acquisition and their definitions as well as a description of the process of acquisition of soft skills and of the positioning and evaluation which are linked to it - The training kit enables the preparation and implementation of soft skills training in any organization and with any learner. It describes the training method and program in detail and provides training summary sheets by level. It also provides suggestions on the pedagogical tools to use at each stage of the training or the posture to adopt as a trainer. - The Soft skills pedagogical toolbox presents a collection of more than 80 tools that can be used to train in soft skills. The tools are based on the experience of the project partners. The training kit suggests their use. - The soft skills positioning and evaluation protocol provides all the keys to evaluate and certify the acquisition of soft skills. It describes the different moments and methods of training and gives tools to evaluate correctly; All our tools have been tested with our target audiences, i.e. trainers and people who are far from employment or in a handicap situation. Thus, a first virtual mobility allowed us to train in English 14 trainers coming from the respective structures of each partner in the use of the Soft skills tools. The 14 trainers indicated that they wanted to integrate the Soft skills tools in their daily work. In a second step, these same trainers were able to test the training in their respective structures. Thus, 98 people who are far from employment or in a handicap situation were able to follow at least one soft skills training. 70 of them could be evaluated and 62 validated the level of soft skills they were trained to. Our tools have been made available to everyone free of charge on our digital educational platform www.softskills-project.eu and have been disseminated on our social networks, our web pages and during our dissemination events.