OVPELO News
Portfolio of employability skills and platform are launched
Project developments
The partnership of 7 European organizations working in the field of youth and EVS has been working for the past 1,5 year on the development of approaches on how to respond to the urging need to better valorize the competences of young people and especially EVS volunteers, and support their employability. As a result, the portfolio of employability skills has been created.
Portfolio is a tool created based on the new competences framework developed by the partnership. From the research and literature review it was analyzed what are the current skills needed to improve employability of young people. Then these competences where further analyzed and decomposed to create sets of learning objectives, realistic to achieve, that guide young people how they should keep developing in order to meet the expectations of the employers. We have found out that they are looking for the young people with ability to take initiative, leadership and teamwork competence, able to learn and solve the problems, and with something that we called the self-management skill.
The tool has been creaeted to respond to the need of recognition of learning within the EVS (European Voluntary Service), and this is the main target group. With the testing phase we have observed that much bigger target group can use it, and we recommend it to all young people, who want to develop their competences, and to the youth workers to enable them to better support young people with whom they work.
The portfolio together with the model of the recommendation letter for the EVS volunteers, and many other materials you can find on the official platform of the project: http://www.volunteersemployability.info/ . Below you can find more information about the project developments
About Portfolio
The Portfolio of employability skills it is a tool developed within the OVPELO project that aims to support EVS volunteers in identifying and evaluating their competences. It was created to support young people while entering the labor market. While working on the project we have observed two challenges:
- Young people do not realise what they know and can do;
- Learning and competences obtained by young people within the mobility projects (especially EVS) are not presented to the employers and due to this they do not serve as an added value within the job application process.
How to use it?
We can identify the following functions of the portfolio of the employability skills:
Self evaluation of the young people – the tool serves to enable young people reflect on their own competences
Planning further learning and development – if the tool is being used on a long-term basis, it is possible to use it for planning the learning process. For example within the EVS we can use the tool in the beginning, middle and in the end of the project, using the first time to see what the competences volunteers want to improve, and the second and last meeting as a monitoring and evaluation.
Support the employability of young people – the tool increases young people’s awareness about their own competences, therefore we believe that it can be helpful during job interviews - when the person knows that they can do something, it boosts their self-esteem, and helps them to perform better. Besides while working with the Portfolio young people are asked to think about the concrete situations where/when they have used or practiced the competence, that can serve as well as a preparation for the job interview and help them ¨sell themselves¨
Support of the recognition – with this tool the recognition can happen on various levels, first the personal one, so young people can get aware of their own competences, then recognition by the organization, since we motivate the organizations to issue the tailor-made reference letter (you can download it here!), where the employability skills will be underlined; finally this will serve for the employers to recognize the learning in the mobility activities.
Support in writing your CV – the tool has a part dedicated to sum up each competence to be able to copy and paste text directly in your CV or in your LinkedIn profile. Make more relevant CVs!
Reference Letter
A reference letter might be a good asset when a young person is looking for a job, especially when he is at the beginning of his/her career. The project OVPELO has created a specific template of a reference letter which the young people, current or former EVS volunteers, would be able to request to their coordinators in order to submit it to the attention of a future employer. The advantage of this particular reference letter is that it is composed according to the portfolio, already described and the elements which the letter contains are completely based on the quality criteria and the competences which are in the portfolio. Moreover, the elements could be proved, since the portfolio is proposing the possibility to bring clear examples and dates on when young people have developed the particular competences, stated in the letter.
About the platform
The platform that we have created aims to facilitate the knowledge and innovation developed within the project to the different stakeholders. We have created the section for the different beneficiaries - young people who would like to improve their competences, youth organization to offer the tools to better support young people, and employers, VET instotutions etc. that can better get to know the field of non formla education and mobility projects.
In the platform you will find:
tools developed by the partnership - portfolio with the information how to use it, and reference letter
collection of the different tools for recognition that has been already developed on the European Level
possibility to add yout own tool
forum - where you can exchange information, ask the question and start discussion on the topic
- and all the infromation about the project.
We hope you will find it usefull.
OVPELO project
- Younet (Italy)
- Asociación Cazalla Intercultural (Spain)
- Semper Avanti (Poland)
- Koinoniki Anaptyksi Neon / Social Youth Development (Greece)
- Asociatia Nevo Parudimos (Romania)
- Pistes Solidaires (France)
- Association Focus-European center for development (Bulgaria)
Check out as well our blog: https://ovpelo.wordpress.com/
Email: ovpelo@gmail.com
Website: http://www.volunteersemployability.info
Phone: +39 051 0544845
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ovpelo-742586492527609/?fref=ts
Twitter: @ovpelo