EAGLEs

Empowering and Activating the Young Generation through Learning and employability Skills

Overview and Objectives

Lack of employment, or employment loss, is a very stressful event for young job seekers. Several studies have indicated that unemployment is related to mental distress and depression, a low level of self-esteem, and a risk of death by suicide. Unemployment is also associated with large and lasting reductions in happiness. As a result, unemployed people, and especially young job seekers, lack the ability and confidence to activate their positive characteristics and end up with inadequate positive emotions, energy and motivation to achieve their goal.

Employability skills are typically considered essential qualifications for many job positions and hence have become necessary for an individual’s employment success. Skills such as team working, communication, problem-solving, and self-management, are highly valued by employers, often far more than educational qualifications. However, employers report that young job seekers seem to lack, or need to improve basic employability skills that make them more ready to enter the labour market, face job requirements, and adversities, and subsequently be productive at work. Thus, it is vital to develop and test interventions that can help unemployed people to manage their aversive situation, build skills, and maintain an acceptable level of mental health and wellbeing.

The EAGLEs project set out to develop an innovative and practical training package for young unemployed people to acquire positive coping skills based on positive psychology principles as well as professional skills that will facilitate their personal development, their employability, and foster their entrepreneurial spirit.

The project objectives were:

To develop, test and publish an innovative training program for young job seekers combining positive psychology and employability skills.
To create an educational tool that will be provided to youth workers to further enhance the quality and professionalism of their efforts to help young unemployed to acquire skills and qualifications support them on their journey to job search.
To enrich youth workers’ personal and professional development so as to be able to better support young unemployed people in their job search.
To create and publish the educational tools and strategies in a widely available online format.

Activities/Outputs

Through an in-depth national needs’ and a detailed review of previous literature and relevant current projects and initiatives on a national and European level, EAGLEs, has identified an existing gap in EU countries in employability skills and has developed a new, practical training programme for youth workers. youth are in need of both academic competencies as well as skills that are required by the labour market. Thus, the need of this training package emerged, where the most desirable skills are explored, taught and practiced. The identification took place after the online questionnaires that were sent to managers and unemployed youth, where the consortium analysed the results.

The training package was designed to be used in three possible ways:

As a teaching guide for trainers working with young job seekers;
As a learning tool by job seekers – in other words they can work through the manual on their own;
As a reference tool by trainers and job seekers who have already gone through the training workshop.

It contains clear guidelines for trainers / youth workers / coaches to utilise for a training session to take place.

Impact

The main target group of this project is youth workers in youth organisations, Universities or other related youth services/synergies. The EAGLEs training package allowed the target group to receive new knowledge and develop new skills that will assist them in progressing at both professional and personal level. The project aimed to have a strong and positive impact at both national and European level and to enrich and complement other relevant initiatives aiming to tackle unemployment such as job placements, internships and trainings on job search techniques and interviewing skills, promoting increase in employment of young job seekers.

Partners

The project team involves institutions across four European countries including The Institute of Development Ltd (Greece), GrantXpert Ltd (Cyprus), Panteion University of Social and Political Science (Greece), CESIE (Italy), and ICEP Europe (Ireland).