The project “To SWITCH – Towards Senior workers’ Innovative Training Challenges” – gathers a network of eight partners from seven European countries and is intended to create three intellectual outputs (IO) aimed at the innovation and improvement of training processes as well as at the updating of trainers and professionals involved in the training of adult workers, particularly those aged over 50. Over the last years, professionals involved in adult education have faced the challenge to reconsider their way of working in terms of approaches, methods and tools. Increasingly, they have been requested to introduce learner-centred paradigms in training (to include learners’ background, motivation, expectations, inclinations, critical thinking skills, perspectives). With the profound transformation in pedagogical paradigms, tailor-made approaches have proven to be central to tackle the training of older workers with outdated skills, approaching the end of their career. Such intense changes are combined with the current demographic emergency. The increasing number of workforces aged over 50, combined with a very low labour substitution rate make it a huge challenge to secure market productivity and competition as well as social cohesion. Even more so, with the negative and unpredictable effects of the COVID-19 emergency. Public policies and businesses struggle to implement programmes to foster inclusion and sustainability within the market and business organizations regardless of the workers’ age. The skills demand by the labour market has been rapidly evolving, thereby dismissing some competencies because outdated, in favour of more modern ones, such as critical and computational thinking and problem solving, all to be applied to high-tech scenarios. In this framework, the To SWITCH project sets as objective meeting all these challenges by enhancing the role of lifelong learning especially among 50-year olds and over. To meet this objective, the project will focus on the definition of frameworks of competences, tools and methodologies to the benefit of all professionals addressing the training of older workers. Thanks to a hands-on lab-based approach, professionals from the different countries will share a new theoretical and methodological framework of reference (IO1) based on an updated andragogical model for the training of older workers. They will collaborate on the development, implementation and experimentation of the digital platform (IO2) for the training of trainers and on contents development (methodologies, tools, etc.) and will finally design training guidelines (IO3). To meet the aforementioned objectives, the project will develop over 5 work phases (WPs). WP1 and WP5 will be cross-sectional phases as they will focus effective project management and dissemination of results respectively. WP2, starting from the analysis of existing scientific literature and best practices, will focus on the definition of a new andragogical paradigm, which, together with the identification of new social, psychological and pedagogical profiles of senior workers professionals, will lead to a theoretical and methodological framework of reference. This work phase will be preparatory for the design of the rest of the innovative outputs. WP3 will be focused on the development of an open source digital platform for the learning and mutual sharing of professionals and institutions dealing with senior workers’ training. This tool will make the most of the collaborative learning holistic approach, which will be useful to adapt the andragogical model to a technological context (theory). The model will influence the digital infrastructure (container), the training resources (content) and the way of using them (method). After an experimentation stage of training courses addressed to trainers/training supervisors/coaches/mentors across all the countries involved in the project, WP4 will focus on designing guidelines (IO) with recommendations and suggestions for all professionals and institutions dealing with the training of adult workers.
TO SWITCH envisaged to strengthen the role and the competences of those who work in the field of senior workers' training and that have to face with the difficulties of continuously changing productive and technological contexts. The goals pursued were the development of a new theoretic-methodological model starting from the literature analysis and the definition of new professional profiles; the implementation of the digital platform for trainers' training tested and validated at transnational level during the experimentation of pilot training courses addressed to the identified trainers' profiles; the draft of the Guidelines for the training and update of seniors' workers trainers, shared with the partnership and output of the local experimentation to be transferred to all the fields of adult training and to their trainers; the awareness of the actors who work in the training during the multiplier events organized in each project partner; the activation by the Province of Trento of a permanent Laboratory on active ageing that involves the partners and all those interested in the topic as place of experimentation, dialogue and design of new ideas.
The project intended to face the challenges of the active ageing and of the decline of the senior workers' skills towards lifelong learning systems considering the role of trainers and other key figures of the learning of senior workers as crucial. It started by the trainers' training and provided them with concrete tools so that their upskilling/reskillig training activities of adult workers can be adequate and usable taking into account the changes linked to the digitization of the work and the resulting demand of new skills. This is leading to a decrease of workability, to cultural marginalization and to exclusion of workers over 50.