What is WOW

About the project

The project WoW (World Skills of World Youth for better employability) brings together representatives of different sectors – educational institutions, non-profit organisations, providers of non-formal training, youth workers and youth organizations to work together and to develop a tool-kit with learning scenarios that bridge the gaps between youngsters' skills and the world of work via non-formal education methods. The toolkit is intended as an instrument for youth workers and will be complemented by a training course that will increase the youth workers' capacity to provide non-formal training, which can also match with the curricula in a formal education settings.

WoW is strongly motivated by the EU Agenda for new skills and jobs as future perspective, as well as by the Education and Training 2020 strategic priorities.

The WoW project is targeted at supporting the youth workers to develop youngsters' skills and competences for employability and requires international setting of the partnership, which will allow multi-perspective to the development of the intellectual outputs and will bring wider relevance of the content and the approaches, which will be produced.

The mismatch between the skills which education provides and the skills necessary for employment is often a significant obstacle for the young people to obtain a job and to start a career. With the dynamic development of the technologies and their impact on the economy, formal occupational qualifications and experience become less important than generic competences that are more significant for the individual's competitiveness in the labour market. These competences give distinct advantage within a cohort of people with equal educational level and the non-formal education has an important role in helping young people to develop them. Researchers agree that the factors, which influence the youth unemployment are mostly determined by the local economical context rather than the general country context and might be similar in different regions around the world, if and when the economic conditions are similar.

Not the least, with a view of the open EU market, the competences that influence the occupation and career paths need to be compatible, so the international EU setting is the adequate format to initiatives in the field.

The European cooperation is required in particular for:

• Knowledge transfer and peer-learning;
• Achieving a new quality, built on the shared learning in European context that goes beyond boundaries and defines common methodologies considering the EU priorities and provisions;
• Test trail of the project outcomes with youth workers, operating in different contexts and drawing relevant conclusions with reference to their international applicability;
• Dissemination of the outcomes of the project in wider international context.

Benefits from European cooperation come from:

• The strategic choice of the partners, each one with specific skills, networks and background, operating in different countries and contexts;
• Set of methodological and training competences brought in the partnership;
• Possibility for producing multilingual products and open educational resources, and for their cross-border dissemination;
• Collaboration and exchange among institutions and individuals that will allow a meaningful contribution to the consistency in the field of non-formal education across Europe and will advance the capacity of the participating institutions.

Furthermore, through the participation of a partner institution from Chile (P5), the project contributes to achievement of the overall aims of the Erasmus+ Capacity Building projects – fostering cooperation and exchanges in the field of youth with Partner Countries from different regions of the world. The statistics about Chile show positive current tendencies in decreasing of the youth unemployment (with a 1,1% drop achieved between 2012 and 2013). At the same time, the key recommendations from the OECD Skills Strategy to the country underline the necessity to encourage and enable people to learn throughout life, to promote cross-border skills policies and to foster international mobility. The implementation of the WoW project can provide useful patterns that contribute to achievement of the OECD recommendations.