We aimed to improve the employability of disadvantaged youth across Europe by developing an AI-powered chatbot that offers personalized career guidance, including feedback on CVs, cover letters, and interview techniques. We focused on enhancing the digital skills of young people, with emphasis on those from marginalized backgrounds such as NEETs, migrants, and refugees, to help them compete in today’s job market. One of our key objectives was to foster cross-border cooperation between our partner organizations, Social Hackers and Roes Cooperativa, to create a scalable solution addressing youth unemployment. By shifting the focus from formal qualifications to skills, we aimed to bridge the gap in traditional job market and promote skill-based hiring. Additionally, we aimed to empower youth workers by providing them with a tool to enhance their career guidance practices, supporting them in better assisting the youth they work with. Ultimately, we wanted to ensure the sustainability of our impact by making the chatbot an open-source tool and providing resources that would allow its continued use across Europe.
The project aimed to address the mission of the two partner organization and the pressing need of their target groups, such as youth with fewer opportunities, migrant youth and NEET for access to career guidance and competitive digital skills to prosper in the labor market. By the end of the project, we successfully addressed the needs of: 1. Youth Unemployment: through career counseling, CV building webinars, ChatJOB platform with CV and Motivation Letter building features. 2. Digital Competence Development: with fundamentals to AI, online work environments 3. Inclusion and sustainability: 5 interactive online webinars with intercultural dialogue on AI applicability and digital skills in real time scenarios, talks with experts on remote and agile work for promotion of career opportunities for anyone, from everywhere and creation of a digital toolkit including the project resources and material shared by the experts. 4. Cross border collaboration: reaching to target audiences from Netherlands, Greece and beyond through SALTO and the SHNL online cohorts, we brought young people together to identify their needs through surveys and share with them the project results along with an online training on digital skills.