Problem addressed

Vulnerable youth face multiple challenges during the transition phase from education to employment and require a range of support that goes beyond traditional interventions.   In many EU countries, as per example Spain or Greece, after many years of ESF and national funds investment in traditional vocational training and career guidance programmes, the situation for most vulnerable youth has not changed: the unemployment rates are still very high and affect the same target.  There is a critical gap between traditional interventions and vulnerable youth needs to engage with the labour market that explain this failure, among others:  - Reproducing regular mainstream education schemes, where vulnerable youth failed. - Having an established agenda that does not meet vulnerable youth individual needs. - Focusing just on facing professional challenges, forgetting the personal ones that often block vulnerable youth. - Focusing just on hard skills development or job search techniques, forgetting beneficiary’s empowerment through developing self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, soft skills and social capital. - Being delivered by professionals who are not seen by vulnerable youth as potential role models. - Not offering post-intervention support when the program is finished, whether they get a job or not.  New empowering and upskilling methodologies need to be developed, tested and assessed to support traditional interventions to address the challenge of vulnerable youth unemployment.

Innovative solution

The social innovation goal is to establish mentoring as a new impactful and sustainable form of learning to empower and upskill vulnerable youth during the transition phase from education to engage with the labour market, increasing their employability and quality of life, complementing traditional vocational training and career guidance interventions, and enhancing community engagement, solidarity and helpfulness through volunteering.  The social innovation is based on Autoocupació’s successful mentoring program for underserved young entrepreneurs, scaled across Catalonia trhough public and private partnerships, across Spain trhough the Youth Business Spain network and across other EU countries through the Young entrepreneurs succeed project funded by the EEA & Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment.  This proved mentoring methodology will be adapted to vulnerable youth needs, developing a new offer to be piloted in Catalonia and Thessaly through local public and private partnerships, assessed under a proper impact assessment framework and disseminated at EU level to facilitate its implementation in other countries, targets or contexts.

Key results and benefits

Ready 4 Work positions mentoring as an essential new form of learning with multiple objectives. An innovative mentoring methodology will be developed and implemented, including protocol, guidelines, and training materials (see document included as Annex). This approach will enhance the employability of young people facing vulnerability by upgrading their communication skills, capacity to access labour market opportunities, self-efficacy, and self-image. Through the facilitation of 90 mentor-mentee matches per country, the young people will have the opportunity to be guided by labour market experts in an experiential process. This voluntary knowledge transfer will complement the active engagement of the participant youth in new forms of learning, broadening their skills and knowledge base for personal and professional development. Furthermore, the improved capacity of the mentoring managers and volunteer mentors will benefit the entities involved in this project. The methodology, processes, and results of the project will be disseminated to at least 60 organisations outside the consortium, while the partners and EMN may share their know-how with organisations that are interested in this approach after the project ends. To this end, this intervention is expected to encourage cooperation between different public and private sector organisations and strengthen their partnerships.  The consortium considers the impact assessment framework as a crucial self-diagnostic and self-improvement tool, which aims to capture already from its design steps the voice of vulnerable youth, especially those currently inactive and/or long-term unemployed, i.e. those who often fly below the radar of PES, due to a perceived lack of trust towards those institutions. The end goal is to present this improved and tested impact assessment mixed methods tool, which then can be used by public and private organisations to evaluate similar interventions concerning VY based on a Theory of Change.

Potential for mainstreaming

Ready for Work aims to facilitate the implementation of a this new voluntary mentoring offer for vulnerable young people in other EU regions and countries.To achieve this objective the projaect has the following levers: 

- A public event organised in Brussels which will be attended by European organisations dedicated to the inclusion of vulnerable groups potentially interested in the adoption of the new mentoring offer. 

- EMN's capacity to influence the European Commission's inclusion policies through its regular advocacy activities and to share best practices among its members. 

- Youth Business International and Global Entrepreneurship Network, joined by Autoocupació, with member organisations in most European countries, most of which develop inclusion activities for vulnerable young people in addition to entrepreneurship support services. 

- At national level, Autoocupació and ANKA are part of different national networks focusing on social economy, youth inclusion and skills development that would be engaged to transfer the new offer to their members in other regions.