Project Vocational Guidance in CLIL

Context

To stimulate the economic growth and fight unemployment, the European Commission considers the free mobility of workers and citizens as one of the most important rights to be encouraged, because it is an essential component of the common labour market.

In a context of severe economic crisis and the consequent difficulty of interpreting the needs of a labour market in strong contraction, the free mobility of European workers can help tackle the socio-economic changes and thus contribute to reach the main targets of the Europe 2020 Strategy for growth, jobs, social equity and inclusion.

However, in order to achieve a strong, sustainable and balanced growth, the European Union needs a skilled workforce.

Objectives

The project’s objective is to promote the free and successful movement of workers in Europe through the use of a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) methodology.

The partnership will develop an Open Educational Resource (OER) in order to support, in terms of both vocational guidance and language training, all those people who want to have a job experience in another European country.

Therefore, the educational resource will be created in the partners’ national languages and structured as a CLIL course with gradual difficulties.

Using various forms (i.e. text, dialogues, videos, audio files, etc.), this tool will improve the trainees’ communication skills in a foreign language while simultaneously addressing vocational guidance topics such as: how to write an effective curriculum vitae, how to write an effective cover letter, how to behave during an interview, what are the most common employment contracts, what are the best job searching channels, how to deal with money/salary issues…

The training platform will be freely available from this website.

Target groups

The target users of the training platform are adults, both employed and unemployed, who have completed their education and are planning to look for a job abroad to start their professional life, to make new experiences or to find a better position.

A sample of 100 members from the target groups with different background in terms of age, education, job experience and social status will participate to the piloting phase in the five countries and languages of the partnership.

Impact

The project will contribute to change the mindset of European workers and to make them plan their professional life not only in national but in European terms.

The project is also going to encourage trainers and guidance operators to include CLIL methodology-based tools into their activities, with the objective to exploit this effective methodology outside the usual path of formal education and to affirm the idea that it could be particularly useful in the field of adult education.

Ultimately the greatest impact will be to foster in Europe a well-performing training system that provides European workers with the skills required by the labour market and the economy. 

The partners and the organisations involved in the project’s implementation will embed the OER into their usual training and guidance activities, ensuring the sustainability of the results. The structure of the OER will give the opportunity to add further languages, and in theory to collect all the languages spoken in Europe.