The project objectives were: 1) To foster the employability of adults with cognitive disabilities or mental health issues through the acquisition of social skills and through training placements; this objective was to be achieved through training courses based on the meta-cognitive method (created precisely to develop self-awareness and awareness of the Other in people with cognitive difficulties), starting from the exchange of good practices, and through a training course in companies. 2) To improve the competences of trainers over 40 in the C-VET sector, through 2.1- a Toolkit consisting of training practices based on the meta-cognitive method 2.2 - an assessment tool. 3) To support trainers over 40, especially women, in the C-VET sector in a pathway to become Mentors of company tutors, favouring the employability of people with cognitive disabilities through one-to-one support to their tutors. 4) To collect, compare and enhance Good Practices related to the development of social skills designed for the project target, in order to create a Training Toolkit. 5) To foster the partners' comparison with similar organisations at European level.
The project arose from the needs expressed by the partners. Fondazione Monnalisa and CEL Foundation were looking for opportunities to give visibility to their commitment to fostering new employment opportunities for people with disabilities of various kinds, especially cognitive disabilities. Skill Up has experience of working with the metacognitive methodology, which enhances people's self-awareness, and wanted to apply this methodology to the target for which it was originally conceived, namely people with cognitive difficulties, as the Feuerstein Method works. Neotalentway has been collaborating for years at a local level with institutions and associations in defence of mental health, and it was from them that the idea of widening the target audience to people with mental health problems was born: in Spain, in fact, there is a serious problem related to the increase of cases of people with various types of mental disorders who are not diagnosed and treated, due to problems related to socio-economic-cultural background and the stigma that mental illness brings with it. These people, in the absence of external intervention, tend to isolate themselves and fail to reintegrate into social and working life.