Understanding My Journey: Supporting Soft Skills Development for Young People (UMJ) is a new Erasmus + Project being led by Ballymun Job Centre along with European Partners OAZA (Croatia), STRIM (Poland), Dianova (Spain), Anespo (Portugal), Action Synergy (Greece), IFOA (Italy) and REY Europe (UK).

UMJ aims to support young people, and their practitioners, to ensure that the interventions they take part in, including mobility, training, volunteering and entrepreneurship programmes, have maximum impact in terms of soft skills development (SSD) that can be quantified and built upon. It is hoped that producing tools using an IT base will make them easily accessible to Young People.

The Project consortium work with young people on initiatives that aim to increase employability and develop soft skills (SS). We have observed, and participants have reported, significant change in terms of personal development but they are less able to break down and articulate how they have changed, using practical & tangible examples of SSD.

WHAT CAN YOU GET?

We will develop tools to support young people to reflect on the SS they have developed through participation in a specific activity. We are a diverse partnership, in our organisational profiles & target groups, which will facilitate powerful collaboration for tools to be developed and applied in different contexts.

OBJECTIVES:

• Improve young people’s engagement with & ownership of SSD
• Increase young people’s employability
• Raise awareness of the importance of SSD To achieve this we will:
• Identify the most important & relevant SS for young people, in terms of personal & professional development
• Gain an insight into existing good practice in supporting young people to recognise achievement in relation to SS
• Develop a toolkit to guide young people to assess their achievements in terms of SSD and support them to recognise & articulate progress
• Provide guidance for practitioners working with young people to support them to integrate the toolkit and ensure that young people are empowered to take ownership of their SSD