e-STEP aims at upskilling and supporting vulnerable young adults (from disadvantaged backgrounds and with fewer opportunities) in the acquisition of key competences for their professional and personal life. The key competencies are becoming increasingly important due to not only the need of adequate professional and business skills and abilities and higher adult employability, but also because they expand opportunities for adults’ personal fulfilment, eventually leading to a more meaningful and happier life. Key competences are a significant factor to social and economic development and for the wealth creation so their development becomes an important challenge for themselves. There is a need for young adults to enhance their personal and professional skills and competences. Given the current instability in the labour market and the need to reduce the risk of social exclusion, this applies particularly to the low-skilled and the low-qualified. Moreover, expanding the adult education to those more vulnerable groups can create new possibilities for active inclusion and enhanced social participation. In this context, e-STEP project will design and test a training and coaching syllabus on key competences to low-skilled and vulnerable young adults, taking also advantage of the use of digital tools and learning. Key competences addressed will mainly include digital, communication and social skills, along with learning to learn, entrepreneurship and cultural awareness and expression, but with the particularity that the learning contents will be specifically chosen based on the final beneficiaries’ identified needs and educational shortages. In order to enhance their motivation, the final beneficiaries will play a key and a very active role since the project inception, participating in the identification of their own training needs and in the design of the learning syllabus they will be benefited from. The partner consortium, composed of 5 public and private institutions from 4 EU countries (France, Sweden, Greece and Spain) with expertise in adult education and direct access to final beneficiaries, will jointly develop: • A transnational identification report on the educational demands and challenges pointed out by the target group. To do so, partners will first conduct some interviews/questionnaires and encounters with representatives from the target groups. Using the insights from the questionnaires along with research work, each partner will elaborate an individual report on the target group’ educational challenges and demands. The transnational analysis will be the comparative analysis of the regional work, looking for common patterns. 100 young adults will be participating in this transnational diagnosis along with 20 experts and stakeholders. • The e-STEP transnational syllabus on key competences, including the necessary educational tools for training implementation, developed by the project partners, based on the insights from the transnational analysis. In order to maximize the transferability character of this final output, the programme will be available in English, French, Spanish, Swedish and Greek. This training programme will be composed of selected learning outcomes from the eight key competences based on the previous identification of learning needs phase. Once it is designed, the programme will be tested and evaluated twice at transnational level. Training courses will be delivered to at least 15 young vulnerable adults in the 4 project countries (60 beneficiaries in total). The programme will be therefore designed taking into account their final beneficiaries own identified needs, while related stakeholders will also play a crucial role in the support service design and in the project activities. An evaluation of the training is also planned in order to present a programme that fully replays to the identified necessities and target group’s demands and will make this output easily transferable to other territories.
With this project, we wanted to set in motion a useful tool created from the knowledge and experiences of all the parties involved; working on a training plan to improve those basic skills needed to find a job or to continue to progress in training. It was also about improving the educational dimension in the workshops by strengthening the pedagogical approach and adapting it to the most vulnerable groups, working on the individual dimension of the participants but also on a more structured work in the workshops. Another objective was the capitalisation of our experience by third parties, by other networks, for example in France through the Qualipopi certificate. On the other hand, projects like e-Step allow a great interaction with young people, by integrating the psycho-social aspect of popular education, which is not always found in formal education, into the training of key skills. Finally, the exchange with the professionals of the partnership, the methodological discussion, and the valuable approaches brought by each country, were a plus for our work.
Although the starting situation was different for each partner, the main need of the partnership was similar: To work on the reinforcement of key competences among young people as an essential precondition for the employability of the most disadvantaged and who, for various reasons, have fewer opportunities to access training and employment. The opportunity offered by transnationality was a fundamental aspect in guiding the project towards the success of this objective: The comparative analysis of the experiences of each partner and the design of training programmes that, while respecting diversity, had common points (European dimension) were the key to obtaining results and innovation in each country. The results of the project showed us the relevance of our analysis: comparing training approaches and finding common ground through transnational analysis and joint programming is a useful method to improve each country's experiences and to address the problem from a multidimensional point of view. The project was able to prove that the improvement of key competences remains a vital element for the training and employability of young European.