EU project managers gaining PACE



Holger Bienzle, die Berater® at the AIVD (on the left)

Holger Bienzle of die Berater® presented the PACE (Project Actors Community in Europe) project at the annual conference of the AIVD, the Slovakian umbrella organisation of adult education providers.

In the presence of high officials from the national ministries of labour and education and of EAEA, the European Association of the Education of Adults, the perspectives of transnational cooperation in the light of the upcoming new EU funding programmes were  discussed by more than 60 stakeholders.

PACE, the emerging Project Actors Community in Europe, which offers ample learning and sharing opportunities for European project managers, was very much appreciated by Slovakian adult educators as a chance to build on previous project management know-how.

How to validate soft skills for today’s global labour market place

Professional life and career development is increasingly determined by continuous learning to adapt to rapidly changing demands. In the service sector, personal, social and organisational competences (SPOC) are especially necessary; thus becoming competitive factors at the job level. The European project VITA utilises a unique and innovative validation system (LEVEL5) for these competences to provide evidence of human potentials for learners, educational professionals and employers.
VITA Final Conference in Dublin - Honoured by the presence of the Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciarán Cannon T.D.

The VITA system is aimed to assess and evidence competence developments by means of the LEVEL5 system which is specifically designed to assess and visualize personal, social and organizational competences acquired in non- and informal learning settings. VITA has been realised within then European countries. The final conference in Dublin was held in a historic place with a long tradition of studying and learning, the Dublin City University.

The Minister addressed the audience with a very inspiring speech, in which he also underlined the importance of improving continuously competences and skills:




Ciarán Cannon T.D., Minister of State for Training and Skills

“Today’s conference is the culmination of two years’ work which has been exploring the validation of social, personal and organisational competences across a range of education sectors in ten European countries. These soft skills, as they are often referred to, can be difficult to measure but are a very important aspect of today’s global labour market place. Such skills may not be learned in a formal setting but are often acquired in informal settings through day-to-day interactions – at school, at home, in the workplace or through active citizenship in your local community. These skills have become a competitive factor in the labour market and through this project VITA aims to build a standardised method of measuring these soft skills.” 


One of the additional highlights of the VITA final conference was the award ceremony in which the award winners were given the VITA prize for innovative project ideas.

Winners of the VITA Award and the VITA project partners

If you want to learn more about the VITA project please visit: www.vita-eu.org or contact our project manager Bozica Ilijic, b.ilijic@dieberater.com

European Proof of Voluntary Work

Volunteering does not only benefit others, but also benefits the volunteer as an individual. Within volunteering settings various social skills are being developed, but these are hard to document on paper.

The RIVER system, which was developed in the EU Grundtvig project of the same name, is an assessment and evaluation method for recognising the development of competences that are gained during volunteering activities. The RIVER methodology is now available as a management tool for institutions and networks that organise volunteer activities. For a better understanding of the method, a brochure as well as a manual and training materials have been developed and are free for download.

Whether and to what extent competencies are further developed through volunteering, can be evaluated by using different RIVER methods - from the self-assessment, to tandem evaluation or a focus group. The RIVER methodology is based on LEVEL5, which is an approach and instrument to document and visualise competence development.

The approach is supported by a software to create a meaningful evidencing document (certificate) including a 3D visualisation of the development of the volunteer.
You want to use the RIVER methodology for your organisation? Follow these links and learn more about RIVER and its application:

RIVER Brochure

RIVER Manual

RIVER Training

ICT-go-Girls empowers young girls through education

It is a fact that a sense of Initiative and Entrepreneurship as one of the crucial key competences for lifelong learning of the European Commission is underrepresented in European secondary schools. Research reports show that girls are less motivated in pursuing entrepreneurial careers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), opting rather for traditional jobs.  ICT can provide a flexible and potential motivational environment for empowering young girls in their future choices, their studies and jobs.

The ICT-go-Girls project aims to enhance entrepreneurship skills among lower secondary school girls, by using ICT as the key element. Young girls 10 to 14 will be empowered with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be able to create future opportunities for innovation and quality ICT related employment.

 

Career Education for Girls

As missing knowledge on the diverse job profiles and routines in the ICT sector as well as stereotypes on the character of people and work in the sector are reasons for girls not to opt for a career in this field, it is important to address the landscape of ICT jobs nowadays, underlining the creative, social and highly communicative side of jobs in this field as much as giving insights into options to work self employed in this sector. This project involves relevant actors from the ICT sector such as schools, universities, teacher training institutions, ICT research centres, educational administrations etc. in Europe and overseas spreading to Australia where research studies can be compared to the European results. ICT-go-Girls focuses on key competences for lifelong learning such as: Entrepreneurship, Digital Competence, Mathematical Literacy and Communication in Foreign Languages.

Including Role Models

This approach of girls to get in touch with female role models is widely used with different formats from presenting biographies of women online to ambassadresses or databases with women available to meet girls during events at schools etc. Here, we would like to underline the importance to give insights not only into the job profile and a usual working day, but to ensure also an insight for the girls into the personal life of these women. Future family life, motherhood and how to combine this with work, in particular when it comes to a male dominated sector, is of high relevance for the girls and their future choice of career. When designing actions with role models, the principle of “the closer, the better” is helpful in terms of meeting in person, but even more in relation to the age difference to the girls.

 

Thinking outside the Box

In order to make a difference, ICT-go-Girls emphasizes on teaching or promotional material with a gender sensitive language and avoids the representation of stereotypes in pictures, story boards etc. used. This is of utmost importance in order to make the variety of choices visible, especially when it comes to gender as well as a professional sector with deeply rooted stereotypes.

The Simplicity of Wikis – how they work

 

 

 

 

 

Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet and are therefore widely used in various sectors and levels of education. With its idea of a potentially collective, democratic, open, and dynamic design of knowledge creation wikis enhance collaborative learning.

The European Project WikiSkills…

...provides opportunities for meaningful collaborative learning activities;

...promotes digital literacy, as well as social skills, writing skills and critical thinking;

...develops a sustainable virtual community of practice among the different project countries;

...enables educational communities to contribute to the actual information society;

...empowers civic behaviours, social inclusion, employability and cultural understanding.

 

 

 

There is one simple button that is the core of a wiki: the edit button!

 

 

In every wiki - just click on it and see what happens! Edit things and then just click save. And that's it! Like emails or blogs, wikis are very simple to use.

 

A wiki enables online-group collaboration and asynchronous collaboration

With wikis a group of people can collectively edit text. This text can be viewed and also changed by anyone who wants to contribute and has something to say about a particular matter.

Everybody knows Wikipedia, but wikis are not only for encyclopaedias. Wikis go beyond that!

 

Wikis can be used for many different purposes

Examples include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and note-taking.

1. Co-authoring

› Technical documentation

› Q&A

› Grant requests

2. Meetings

› Defining agenda

› Recording participant names

› Writing reports

3. Brainstorming & community of practice

› Gathering and publishing of good practices

› Discussions

4. Project management

› Listing tasks

› Completion status

 

A number of wiki platforms are available – MediaWiki, DokuWiki, XWiki to name a few – and each wiki platform supports a slightly different bundle of features to support collaboration.

 

You want to learn more about wikis? Go to www.wikiskills.net