VET_GPS - Guiding tools for Professional Skills development in VET focus on the acquisition, development and assessment of soft skills of trainees attending VET training, essential for their personal development, social participation and workplace success, contributing to:
the reduction of early School Leaving / combating failure in education
overcome skills mismatches between the training and labour market needs
the promotion of rates of employability, by providing career guidance
Overview
Soft Skills are recognized to be the success factor enabling individuals’ well-being, self-confidence, autonomy and responsibility, fulfilment of education/social and professional lives, career development and higher income. However, the set of Soft Skills is often referred to be as non-measurable skills by conventional tests or exams, as they include a wide range of skills related to the individual mind-set, such as: capacity building, learning to learn, persistence, resilience, creativity, self-discipline, self-reflectiveness, acting autonomously.
Due to their nature, Soft Skills can be life or work-oriented, but some of them are both, being difficult to define the boards. That is the main reason why individuals possessing higher range and levels of the set of Soft Skills will be better prepared to obtain educational and professional qualifications and be better prepared for the world of work, but also of live meaningful, sustainable and more responsible lives in a constant and changing world.
This is the basis of VET_GPS project, which will capitalize and further develop the knowledge and experiences of the results from 2 previous projects:
Employ project that includes a toolkit for the identification, development and recognition of soft skills needed for the successful integration of young trainee’s in the workplace
In-VET project, based on two previous projects - Stop Dropout! coordinated by Blickpunkt Identität and The School Inclusion coordinated by Pixel – the project has three main outputs i) Risk-assessment tool, ii) Counselling guidelines for Vocational Education and Training (VET) counsellors and iii) Training course for VET professionals.
At the end of the project the partnership expects to have a wide set of tools resources, exercises and training materials supporting VET trainees and VET professionals, allowing the inclusion of soft skills in regular VET offer to prevent early drop outs from VET system and increase the employability rates of recent qualified trainees, through the acquisition, development & assessment of soft skills, in line with market needs.