Soft Skills for employability and competitiveness in the labor market
A transnational and cross-sectorial assessment developed by the ESSENCE Project
ESSENCE’s objective is to Improve employability opportunities for HE students leveraging on soft skills development. The objective is to maximize their engagement in the labour market offering professional development paths through training and education on soft and “intangible” skills.
ESSENCE develops and deploys a flexible and permeable learning pathway: users can access and exploit the training “on-demand” and “on a need basis” to enhance their soft skills literacy and professional self-empowerment.
Back in 2016, analysts from the World Economic Forum foreseen a major switch in what would have been by 2020 the “top 10 skills” for employability, recruitment, career development and business competitiveness. According to the report, the opportunity for fresh graduates and HE students to compete on the job market would depend increasingly on soft and relational skills, rather than mere technical competences…
WEF’s findings are corroborated by numerous international and academic resources that pinpoint with great emphasis the relevance of soft skills for employability in the new incoming decade.
On the basis of that, in the following two years ESSENCE will sustain the development among HE students of intangible and soft skills (such as sense of initiative, critical thinking, creativity and people management) to better strengthen their employability competitiveness in the labour market; its innovative methodology relies on demand-drive and bottom up approaches that will lead partners in the creation of several strategic results:
- Online interactive platform (OER Platform) in Multilanguage version: available here
- Transnational report highlighting the “most wanted” soft skills for employability in the EU labour market (desk research + survey conducted among 100 employers)
- Online business glossary to be used as a concepts-map as well as a reference to orientate students across the universe of soft skills
- Custom-made training courses related to self-empowerment soft skills for employability
- Visibility Events in the participating countries and international awareness of the project
Moreover, Partners foresee that project results will be disseminated, mainstreamed and made visible to an overall audience of more than 4 Millions contacts – as an estimated sum from the engagement of the public via offline and offline communication.
The Belgian NGO focus on the phenomenon from an EU and international perspective, scouting for robust good practices and case studies implemented and developed in the EU territory. IHF asbl is an education/training provider and a think tank established in Brussels in 2003 as a Not-for-profit organisation to promote awareness and mainstream European values towards diverse audiences: young people, business community and academia, as well as social partners like associations and public administration. As such, its technical and operative experience assures for high regards of targets’ needs and consitentcy of the overall training curricula to perceived gaps and needs-assessment intercepted at EU and transnational level.
For further information on ESSENCE and other IHF Europe initiatives:
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