The New EUroPaSS – New Europas, promote your Soft Skills with Open Badges project, is designed to provide a comprehensive offer of high quality non-formal adult education and training in order, not only to gain, key skills related to Soft Skills but also to offer a standardized validation which in line with already developed Europass tools. At the first stages of project development, we will make a needs analysis among employing organizations, job seekers and career counselling organizations, to identify main soft skills needed, which will serve as the basis for the development of a framework for soft skills competences. Next step will be to collect examples of best practices for each of the selected competences to be developed. They will also be used as the basis of the development of the Soft skills curriculum, learning tool syllabuses, teaching materials, e-learning materials and assessment methods. After that we will also develop an Open Badges (OB) ecosystem for the SS for jobseekers and develop a European passport supporting document (in accordance with a standard established by the language passport as one of the Europass existing tools). Our newly developed e-validation tool ("OB" system as validation tool in accordance with EU standards) will be a new approach to validating SS. Next step will be to pilot test the developed training materials and the whole OB eco-system, first with professionals and project staff during the JSTE activity, then after we will test them with our final beneficiaries, job seekers. The final step in the project development will be to adapt the training tools and validation process to specific needs and characteristics of migrants, because they, as a vulnerable group, do need additional support and help. The main target group or the final beneficiaries are job seekers, however, we will also focus on the specific target group of migrants, who are a vulnerable target group in the process of job searching and career development, thus they need special attention. We will adapt the project results and the process of the validation of SS to their specific needs and characteristics. In reviewing the range of activities and projects included in "soft skills" development/evaluation, we have seen that there are many different competences that relate to soft skills, but there are still not many tools in management and innovation, and the need for them is growing according to the information evaluation tools for assessing soft skills. The need for additional evaluation of soft skills is especially visible in working with companies. However, we also have to take into account other relevant stakeholders in the process of validation of soft skills and job seeking. Therefore, from the research we have done so far, we found that besides just the job seekers, we should also involve the employers, employment companies, employment centres, career guidance centres, adult education centres, competence centres, etc. Each organization should actively participate in the development and training of its own staff on the basis of an adequate education policy, as employees are key factors in achieving the intended objectives of their work. The latter, as the increase in incentives for adult education by companies, would prove to be an additional innovation of this project. We must keep in mind that all these different target groups have different interests, needs, particularities, etc., which need to be fully understood and should be involved in the process of determining the common points in order to produce a transversal end product. The newly developed tool will be a support document for self-assessment and validation that will be useful in career guidance centres, national Europass centres, training organizations and other relevant organizations dealing with job seekers. As part of the sustainability strategy we will also encourage partners that they regularly use developed tools within their regular work. Through the project, we want to enable jobseekers or already employed (especially low-skilled) to become more recognizable in using their skills and qualifications, which will enable them to work more efficiently and thus offer new opportunities to the target groups (and wider users, employees and unemployed) in the labour market, and therefore a possible solution to a social problem in terms of unemployment.
Promote your Soft Skills with open Badges (SoftSkills4EU) is a 2 year international project funded by the EU within Erasmus plus KA2 , led by RIC Novo mesto (Slovenia) with cooperation of 4 partners from other EU countries. The main project result is developed platform for evaluating and upgrading of Soft Skills, which is accessible on https://academy-softskills4.eu/. The main objectives followed throughout the project were: • Identify the key soft skills needed in Europe. • Develop new e-tools for assessment and learning using the concept of 'digital badges'. • Develop an evaluation strategy that can also be used by employers, career consellors and other relevant stakeholders. It is a fact that soft skills are challenging to measure for several reasons, either because of the absence of appropriate tools and the unclear evaluation criteria used in the evaluation of 'hard skills'. Because of the different types of people, there are also different approaches and views, that is why knowledge, skills and competences are difficult to standardized. In addition, "soft" skills, competencies become visible only after a long period of working in practice. The main results of the project are mainly useful for the four target groups: jobseekers, employees, employers and adult educators, career counsellors. We gave special attention also to one of the target groups in the labour market - migrants. One of the main objectives of the project was to support the Europass European tool, namely to develop a European soft skills passport with integrated OPEN BADGES (in line with the standards of other Europass support tools). Our project had mainly focused on a systematic inventory of soft skills (research done during the project) and the development of innovative tools for the evaluation of soft skills. We have created the so called 'Soft skills Framework' for the five main areas of soft skills, namely: • Organisational skills, • Co-operative skills, • Creative thinking skills, • Social skills, • Personal skills (coping with stress). Due to the well-established term "soft skills" in the EU, we, in partnership, have kept the same denomination and in the naming of modules, despite the fact that our elaborate "Soft Skills Framework" includes not only skills but also knowledge and competences. The foundation for preparing the framework is the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) and we considered the placing of the knowledge, skills and competence descriptors on three levels (A, B, C). With the levels of knowledge named this way, we wanted the move closer the evaluation system to the Europass tools. The platform provides e-learning materials (base on gathered best practices and creation of new material) from five thematic areas (five educational e-modules). In addition to testing, on the basis of which participants receive "badges", which represent validation of knowledge and skills, the project also produced a system of validation of acquired knowledges, skills, competence in practice through the acquisition of the "Good employee" badge. Within C1 activity we trained 15 career consultants (Soft Skills mentors) to use e-tools and award OPEN BADGES and to help to train other potential professionals to gain mentors badge. Project enables also gaining of SOFTSKILLS mentors badge also after the end of the project. The possibility of using the results of our project is wide: - For raising awareness among jobseekers and employees about the importance of soft skills and their impact on motivation, career development and personal growth. - For preparation of better CVs using our results and Europass tools. - For supporting career counselling (our newly developed tool is accessible to career counsellors in secondary schools’, adult education, to employment services, assessment centres and other organizations. That is why we want to offer them a tool that will make their work easier.) - This tool (thanks to the integrated e-learning material) can be used in both formal and non-formal programmes in adult education or for young people or with staff in education companies. - The tool can be used by employers in recruiting new staff or in preparation of development plan for staff, in monitoring it, for organizing employees to other workplace that are more appropriate to their competences. With implementation of project "face to face" activities we have reached so far more than 1.600 persons from the main target group and stakeholders from relevant and approx. 35.000 via internet-based activities. Partners: • RIC NOVO MESTO, Slovenia (lead partner) • MINISTERIE VAN ONDERWIJS, CULTUUR EN WETENSCHAP, Netherlands • A&A EMPHASYS INTERACTIVE SOLUTIONS Ltd, Cyprus • VISOKA POSLOVNA ŠKOLA PAR, Croatia • PROMIMPRESA SRL, Italy Project platform and webpage with results: https://academy-softskills4.eu/, website: https://softskills4.eu/, https://softskills4.eu/ Video guides: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh0E4B-O0QxfTbPeukZplJg