It is increasingly difficult for young people with low or no formal qualifications to find a job. However, even without formal training or labour market experience, young persons gather social and personal competencies. These “soft” competencies are essential for doing a good job. For some jobs, they may even be the most important elements of qualification. However, employers and those working with young people find it difficult to recognize and assess these informal competencies. Such assessment, though, is important to match employers with potential employees and to define training needs of an unemployed person so as to better satisfy the skill needs of a specific job.

The project “Evaluating the soft skills of unemployed youth” aims at a transfer of best practices of competence assessment for young persons. The main project’s outcomes are:

Need analysis report – The report will identify the soft skills that are considered to be necessary for unemployed youth to enter the labour market.

Curriculum for unemployed youth / soft skills –The curriculum will outline the skills, performances, attitudes and values that youth are expected to learn, while it will include the syllabus, methods to be implemented and other such aspects.

E learning platform – At the platform there will be on-line courses in order the VET trainers and staff to receive training from a distance so as to enable the active participation of individuals from different regions who are not always able to be physically present to workshops/seminars/events.

Toolkit on soft skills – A number of different tools and methods for the development of soft skills will be taught to unemployed youth, in complementarity to the curriculum.

Toolkit User guide – It will include guidelines on how to implement and successfully put to use the different tools available and provided in the toolkit.

For more information you can visit the EVAskills project website or our EVAskills page about the project.