The objective was to improve the employability of young people with fewer opportunities by strengthening the role of YWs in career-orientation pathways. Through an inclusive and transnational approach, SIDE aimed to create a job-oriented training process that would facilitate self-assessment of skills, the use of a professional language, and a more informed access to the labour market. The specific objectives included: • developing innovative training, transferable and applicable in different EU contexts, collected in a toolkit with blended methodologies and inclusive content; • enhancing YW’ competences in career guidance, particularly in multicultural environments; • increasing youth’s participation in active labour-market policies, ensuring equal opportunities and access to resources; • strengthening capacity-building and cooperation among actors from the third sector and the education field; • systematising and disseminating knowledge useful for guidance processes • supporting youth in recognising their informal and non-formal competences, fostering integration and stability in the labour market. These objectives guided all project activities, fully aligned with EU priorities on inclusion, quality youth work and employability
SIDE was developed to address a set of common needs identified in the youth contexts of Italy, Greece and Spain, where the partner organisations work with young people with fewer opportunities, NEETs and early school leavers. Although each national context has its own specific features, all three countries share structural challenges that significantly affect young people’s employability, understood as the combination of skills, resources and conditions that allow individuals to access, remain and progress in the labour market. The main obstacles identified include: socioeconomic precariousness and local prejudices, particularly affecting young people with backgrounds of poverty or belonging to minority groups; linguistic and communication barriers, including the absence of a professional register and the frequent use of slang not appropriate in work environments; lack of recognition of their own skills, especially those developed in informal or non-formal contexts; low self-esteem, which weakens young people’s ability to present and promote themselves in the labour market. SIDE was therefore created from the partners’ shared intention to develop job-orientation materials inspired by existing EU tools and adapted to their context.