The overall objective of OASIS project is to exchange good practices in the field of social jobs of the future. This exchange will be between European local authorities and also other actors of social action. OASIS means « evOlutive & Attractive SocIal jobS ». The project would like to develop a prospective common vision for social actors in European countries, facing similar social issues and mutations such as, access to social rights and public services, the impact of digital technology on professionals and users, the rise of civil society actors and social economy, the support of new publics such as migrants and refugees, the response to sanitary crisis, etc. Social jobs skills are changing to meet new challenges in the practices and to face a lack of attractiveness. The Département de l’Isère (France) leads the OASIS consortium which brings together 3 other partners : Autonomous Region Aosta Valley (Italy), ONG Red Internacional B-Live (Spain), County Center for Resource and Educational Assistance Alba (Romania). This strategic partnership aims to learn from each other, sharing ideas, experiences and solutions experimented in different European countries on three main topics: How to adapt the tools and methods used by social professionals and how to share them ? How to better meet users’ expectations and strengthen their empowerment ? How to build career paths differently and improve social jobs’ attractiveness ? The project will be implemented through the sharing of theoretical and practical knowledge and of experiences on topics (converging at the European level). To implement the project, the partnership will organize short-term joint staff training events, lasting 3 to 5 days each, alternately in Italy, Romania, Spain and France, between September 2020 and August 2022. The main activity will consist on intra-community learning trips, with delegations made up of 5 social professionals per country, with job shadowing and workshops. A kick-off meeting and a final seminar will also be held, involving 50 to 100 participants – social workers, managers, experts, associations and grassroots community. These 2 seminars are participative events and combine several formats such as roundtable meetings (to share knowledge), project accelerators (for collective thinking), co-construction workshops (to produce), TED-style events, moving debates (world cafe, hackathon, open forum, etc) OASIS project will allow participants to increase practices knowledges by experimenting with new ways of acting, improving project methodologies, experimenting collective actions carried out by citizens, discovering other jobs or fields of social action. The partnership will propose recommendations for initial and continuing training, evolution of social jobs’ referential. Another deliverable will be action sheets on transferable and/or innovative experimentations. The final goal is to promote employability and empowerment. In the longer term, the links established between the European partners will allow the consortium to work together to enrich its practices. This project will contribute to developing of a forward-looking approach in the evolution of social professions and to strengthen their attractiveness.
The project aimed to identify what can be experimented with and transposed by social workers, and they drew up guidelines based on the main lessons learned (Appendix 1), with a view to developing professional practices and encouraging continuing social training. These meetings made it possible to explore different professional practices, to carry out cross-reflections, in particular on the notions of core competences and soft competences, to discover different working and practice contexts in the social sector, thus enabling professionals to be in a posture of interactive and permanent learning: through the sharing of experiences and the strength of proposals (for themselves and for their organisation). This strategic partnership has been mutually enriched by the experiences and solutions implemented in the countries around three main issues: to develop the models of intervention with the public and the support tools for social professionals, to better respond to the expectations of the public supported and to put them at the heart of the practices by mobilising their power to act, to continuously adapt to the new challenges and thus improve the attractiveness of the social professions.
A shared observation of a loss of attractiveness of the social professions. This loss of attractiveness is reflected in major recruitment difficulties in all sectors, difficulties in retaining medico-social workers, and a vocational crisis among the younger generations, who are turning away from training schools. This situation, which is partly linked to wider societal issues in the relationship to work, reveals the specific and profound transformations of the solidarity professions. The Department of Isère decided to put this subject up for discussion between European partners in order to allow professionals to observe and compare their professional practices with the aim of developing their skills and making proposals for actions and training necessary for their professional development. This collective exchange allowed them to share, to question each other and to question themselves in order to put meaning and the user at the heart of our practices, thus enhancing the know-how and soft skills of professionals. This knowledge is a major asset for the attractiveness and motivation of social work missions. All this is aimed at transformation.