Mentor Train is coming to an end: Sharing results of the project
After three years of project work, Mentor Train is coming to an end. We would like to share with you the results of the project.
Apprenticeships assure quality learning, decrease skills mismatch and increase employment. However, quality apprenticeships depend on mentorship competence and, although most mentors at SMEs are highly skilled in their technical area, they lack the necessary pedagogy to be able to transfer these skills to apprentices.
The aim of the Mentor Train project has been to create a platform for imparting skills to mentors, particularly experienced workers from SMEs who may not necessarily have relevant mentoring experience but are working with students/apprentices from professional higher educational institutions at EQF levels 5-7.
The goal of the project has been to define the specific competences required by early-stage and experienced mentors and use this to define learning activities which can be used to acquire these competences, structured as a common curriculum for mentorship within PHE apprenticeships.
These competences and learning outcomes have been used to create a course made up of a set of modular online micro-learning units, each of which will allow participants to master a specific competence relevant to quality mentoring. The online training course includes a handbook and a collection of 2-minute video lectures in English, Czech, Slovenian, Estonian, Basque, and Spanish with information about the different stages of the mentorship.
As planned, we also created a practice-sharing platform whereby mentors will be able to share their own creations and re-use those created by other mentors.
The consortium has supplemented all the work done by creating a resource pack of templates and forms which can help mentors standardise each part of the mentorship process and a database of model placement apprenticeship profiles from 12 different areas.
More information at www.mentortrain.eu.