Responding to the unprecedented challenges of COVID19, SMART VET will bring together a Strategic crosse-sectorial Partnership of VET organization, SMEs and YOUTH organizations aimed at preparing a high quality improvement program specifically designed to increase VET teachers, trainers and mentors’ ability to foster VET students' transition to the labour market. Despite being the most academically qualified generation ever and facing all this pressure to succeed academically, employers consistently report that young people are unprepared and unequipped to enter the workplace when they leave full-time education – lacking a broad range of soft skills. The project contributes to help VET students in increasing their employability skills, also during the suspension period as the lockdown due to the COVID-19 crisis. This will directly support “apprentices who are forced to take breaks in training in the workplace or are unable to work due to COVID-19 related prevention measures or illness” as allowed by the UK Department for Education, 2020”. For this reason, the 8 partners coming from different sector sand with different specialities, capitalizing on experience in VET services, employment services, skills development, formal and non-formal education, decided to share their expertise to develop new tools and support materials to support apprentices/VET students to enhance and foster transversal skills needed by the current labour market. The SMART VET training program and interactive tools aim at equipping VET teachers, trainers and mentors in +learn innovative mentoring and fostering techniques, based on non-formal education to tackle some of the challenges offered by the remote-learning situation +learn how use digital, interactive materials and tools to offer more engaging learning possibility to (ex) VET students +learn how to foster (ex) VET students’ soft skills via mentoring while on remote learning situations. The project will offer (ex)VET students a concrete way to prepare for employment and demonstrate to be proactive in their preparation. SMART VET materials can be used by VET students and job seekers with a VET background about to be enrolled in apprenticeship programs, to demonstrate their new / prospective employees they will be an asset to the company, not just a trainee. In particular, by introducing of serious games in in the process, the partners expect to increase both engagement and learning outcomes. The products will be digital to make them easily shared among young people, more used to online environment but also because, digital solutions will offer an easy way to deliver and transfer them, with a wider impact and easer possibility for implement follow up activities. The 7 partners from 7 countries involved in the SMART VET consortium represent a wide range of European diversity, as they are situated in different areas of Europe (UK PL IT CY GR RU TR) and represent different organizations and socio-economical contexts (towns of different sizes, economical environment, and culture) and most of all have different expertise, stakeholders, and audience with different backgrounds and needs. Public Employment Services or local and regional labour offices could also offer free guidance to support people in need for upskilling possibilities. The unemployed and job seekers can take advantage of the products as they provide a new method to facilitate employability skills improvement thus increase their change of employment. It is clear that education and training need to be adapted and linked more closely to the world of work, by bridging that gap between academia and labour market that now appears to be obsolete. Effectively anticipating which skills will be required in years to come by companies is crucial if workers with the right competencies are to be trained. The Consortium was assembled based also on the need of ensuring a comprehensive representation of the different national contexts facing the challenge of VET students facing the labour market for the first time, and of the trainers in charge for preparing them. All stakeholders are benefitting from the project’s results as have a useful program to help companies in identifying the gap between employers’ needs and expectations in terms of sustainable and responsible behaviors by employees: how to deal with a colleagues, how to solve a common problem, how to talk with superiors, but also more ethical and moral situations involving misbehaving / polluting companies, managers that do not respect basic labour rights, and other situation on that will push them to find a sustainable, responsible solutions to an issue.
The partnership’s goals were to meet the Key Action 226 objectives for VET by making an impact on fostering VET students' transition to the labour market. The focus was not only on students and teachers but also on parents, principals and school staff as it could be beneficial for them too on how to enhance skills development and competences. A partnership was complied by partners from 7 Erasmus countries in order to create a training programme and interactive tools that would equipped teachers, trainers and mentors with innovative mentoring and fostering techniques. Additional educational materials and learning tools for professionals were offered on how to use digital, interactive materials and tools in teaching to offer more engaging learning possibility to students and how to foster students’ soft skills via mentoring while in remote learning situations. We are pleased to report that the target groups are now equipped with the necessary tools and competences needed to enter the workplace equipped. SMART managed to strength the profiles of the teachers and educators through enhancing teachers’ professional education on these challenges and supporting teachers in innovative practices. The project achieved to disseminate not only the employability skills in XXI century but also techniques for engaging with, mentoring and coaching students. Last, the project significantly made impact on all stakeholders of the project by having in hand a useful program to help organisations identify the gap between employers’ needs and expectations, such as how to deal with a colleagues, how to solve a common problem, how to talk with superiors, but also more ethical and moral situations involving misbehaving / polluting companies, managers that do not respect basic labour rights, etc.
Despite being the most academically qualified generation ever and facing all this pressure to succeed academically, employers consistently report that young people are unprepared and unequipped to enter the workplace when they leave full-time education, lacking a broad range of soft skills. Additional to this, unprecedented obstacles of COVID19 came to make even harder to respond and face these challenges. SMART project came as a response to create a high-quality improvement programme specifically designed to increase Vocational education and training (VET) teachers, trainers, and mentors’ ability to foster VET students’ transition to the labour market. In particular, SMART helped students to increase their employability skills due to the COVID-19 crisis. Education and training need to be adapted and linked more closely to the world of work, by filling the gap between academia and the labour market. The Consortium was assembled based also on the need of ensuring a comprehensive representation of the different national contexts of VET students facing the labour market for the first time, and of the trainers in charge for preparing them. All stakeholders were benefitting from the project’s results by having a useful program to help companies in identifying the gap between employers’ needs and expectations in terms of sustainable and responsible behaviors by employees. In terms of restorative justice as an approach to empower students’ profiles in order to be able to face the future challenges, restorative justice can promote critical thinking as well as can equip people with the necessary values and practices. Restorative practices emphasize values of empathy, respect, honesty, acceptance, and accountability among participants. These values are necessary for people to feel comfortable and safe in an environment in order to be able to focus on other domains and feel free to share ideas and innovative thoughts. There is a small yet growing body of empirical research into the implementation and effectiveness of restorative justice in education. While they do not directly show the link between restorative practices and creativity, they do demonstrate that they are effective in establishing a social learning environment that can have long-term benefits. SMART was a two-year project that brought together a strategic partnership of 7 organisations from the UK, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Romania, and Cyprus that empowered students to pursue their careers in a very competitive environment. SMART exchanges its results at national and European levels, helping in this way to achieve the project's main objective.