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LIFE. Your Most Important Design Project

2020-2-CY02-KA105-0018782020Youth mobilityfinalizedGood practice
Countries: CY|TR|DE|LT|IT|RS|SI|PL|ES · Grant: €17,126
New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training coursesEarly School Leaving / combating failure in educationLabour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment

Objectives

“What should I do with my life?” or “I have no idea what to do with my life” are some of the most common question and statement we hear as youth workers - for both high school students trying to decide their educational path at University, as well as recently graduated University students who still don’t know what professional path they wish to follow. The problem lies in that professional orientation training is neither embedded into the formal education system in Europe and moreover, the partners of this project have all surveyed our members and youth workers and found that European Youth workers are "not equipped" with the competencies (knowledge, attitudes, and skills) to support young people to figure out their path in life and which career and job field they should pursue to employability. Therefore, this issue is even more pressing. However, when we take a design thinking approach to life design and professional career design, the solutions will appear. Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking, and everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. Taking a design thinking approach to Life Design can help to “reframe” dysfunctional beliefs that surround life and career decisions and help us “way-finding” in a chaotic world through the adoption of such design principles as bias-for-action, prototyping, and team-building. We are passionate about taking this innovative approach to life purpose through design thinking. This training course will empower participants to “think like a designer” when considering what professional life they would love would look like: this means thinking optimistically, empathically, holistically, and collaboratively, with an openness that designers possess when trying to solve a problem. The aim of this training course was to develop the design thinking competencies of 21 European youth workers to effectively support young people to design their professional lives, increase employability, and connect them to their life purpose and job fulfillment. The following were the main objectives of our project: 1. 21 youth workers will increase their knowledge on what design thinking is, its connection with life purpose, the potential for employability, entrepreneurship, and prevention of early school leaving. They will learn how to unleash the potential of the youth for their professional lives through design thinking and innovative approach. 2. 21 youth workers will develop their skills to support youth to utilize design thinking to identify their life purpose and unlock their potential for professional fulfillment. 3. 21 youth workers will increase their awareness of the importance of design thinking to discover and follow their purpose and employability options. This project aims to improve the level of key competencies and skills, with particular relevance to the labor market, entrepreneurship, employability, and youth workers' contribution to a cohesive society. This project is expected to produce the following outcomes of the Erasmus+ Program for youth workers: improved competencies, linked to their professional profiles; better quality of their work and activities in favor of youth; increased capacity to trigger changes in terms of modernization and international opening within their organizations; increased ability to address the needs of the disadvantaged; greater understanding of interconnections between vocational training and the labor market; increased opportunities for professional and career development; and increased motivation and satisfaction in their daily work.

Project partners (9)