The objectives of the project were: 1. Increasing the organizational capacity of both EvoCariera Association (Romania) and EDUQ Association (Poland) to expand their portfolio of career counseling services through a joint process that uses co-design methods, best practice-sharing and piloting a training program for youth workers. 2. Developing the training and facilitation skills of 24 youth workers from Romania and Poland, working in the field of career counselling, including NGOs workers, school master teachers, school counselors and career counselors. 3. Improving the organizational capacity of the project partners in managing ERASMUS+ projects, coordinating joint projects and disseminating projects results. 4.Transferring the project management expertise of the CVCN Association (Romania) to EVOCariera in order to develop its own capacity to manage and coordinate international projects. As an end results, we aimed at creating an end-to-end training program for youth workers, including training materials, activities and facilitation guides, in order to grow the capacity of youth workers in both Romania and Poland to support youth in making academic or professional decisions.
We started the project with the impact on the end beneficiaries in mind, the youth in Romania and Poland. Specifically, looking at the educational offer when it comes to career management skills, we see, in Romania and Poland, that a lack of resources, both financial and in terms of knowledge, is present when it comes to offering the right guidance for the future of work for youth. Coupling this with the fact that Cedefop reports state that, in Romania, 3 out of 4 university students are not working in their field of study, we wanted to implement a project that would support a wide category of young people aged 16-25 to have easier access to career guidance services, by training the youth workers to support their academic or professional choices. In this way, our aim was and still is to fill the gap between the needs of the youth to receive guidance when it comes to making key decisions related to their careers and the limited resources youth workers have at hand to support them in this process.