Supporting the efforts of EU member states to help integrate migrants and refugees into Europe's education systems and ensure their skills development is an urgent and demanding task. The project Valorising Migrants’ experience to increase their Occupational Skills (VAMOS) aims to tackle this existing challenge in all EU countries by valorising migrants’ own experience to act as recognized professionals in Migrants’ labour and social inclusion. Therefore, VAMOS, will achieve a double aim: to enhance labour integration of experienced migrants and to improve the social and labour integration of newcomers. VAMOS consortium, led by Asociacion Horuelo (Spain), is made up of 8 organizations from Greece, Italy, UK and Spain that have a long experience in training and inclusion initiatives with Migrant population. Indeed, four of them have worked in a project called Refugees and Migrants Inclusion Toolkit – REMINT (2017-1-IT01-KA202-006177) that inspired this proposal. The main outcomes to be developed along the 32 months project duration are: - IO1. Professional profile of the Expert in Migrants’ Labour and Social Inclusion. - IO2. Assessment tool on key competencies for Migrants’ Labour and Social Inclusion. - IO3. Training course. Expert in Migrants’ Labour and Social Inclusion. - IO4. Guidelines for Newcomers from Migration Experiences. Other results related to the main Intellectual outputs will be: - VAMOS network. - Guidelines for facilitators. - A repository of Learning materials. VAMOS partnership will put special efforts to dissemination of project results, quality assurance and evaluation as they will be key factors to achieve the project goals and spread the results among other relevant stakeholders at national and international level.
Vamos has a double aim. On the one hand, to value the experience of migrants to improve their skills and abilities in order to increase their employability in the third sector by acquiring the necessary knowledge to carry out this work, but also to use their own experience as a working tool. By improving their competences, these people can in turn facilitate the socio-labour insertion of other people. Their own experience as immigrants allows them to have a more concrete and human knowledge of the processes that newcomers to Europe go through, allowing them to guide, train and facilitate many procedures that are still difficult for nationals. Transversal competences such as cultural awareness, civic and social responsibility, creativity and above all essential communicative competences in the host language come to the fore. The teaching of these skills meets a need for professionalization in order to provide adequate responses to the social and linguistic needs linked to modern European and global migratory phenomena.
VAMOS addresses the growing multicultural character of EU societies in the current context of migration and the need to establish professional profiles specifically designed for migrants and by migrants. The present project stems from the common experience of the Refugees and Migrant REMINT* project, the partnership has shared a common need to go a step further to facilitate the social and economic inclusion of migrants by designing an innovative and specialized professional profile and learning pathway to facilitate labour inclusion. The social inclusion of migrants is linked to the acquisition of transversal competences, which involve not only language, but also the ability to interact in new contexts, knowledge of where relevant information is located and how to use it, basic knowledge of legislation and other skills that are often acquired slowly, through experience. VAMOS project has sought to analyze, channel and valorise this experience in order to facilitate the integration of newcomers.