Trio to Success Project: the steps for making VET a first choice

Punto Cometa (Italy)

The skills mismatch is one of the most important challenges VET organizations need to face nowadays. “Making VET a first choice”, as recently outlined by the EU New Skills Agenda (2016), will depend also on the success in providing tools and solutions to bridge this gap: effective vocational counselling and guidance, new teaching methods, education to entrepreneurship.

The project “Trio to success” aims at exchanging and improving the experience of vocational counselors, teachers and trainers from Italy, Poland and Lithuania.

Four partners have been involved since 2015: Cometa Formazione in Como, the Association of Social Cooperatives (Stowarzyszenie Na Rzecz Spółdzielni Socjalnych) and the Centre for Youth Counselling (Centrum Doradztwa Zawodowego dla Młodzieży) in Poznan, the Centre for Educational and Psychological assistance (Vilniaus Rajono Pedagogine Psychologine Tarnyba) in Vilnius. 

Three different outputs have been prepared until now: a kit of scenarios for vocational guidance and counselling, in line with the labor market; best practices in work-based learning; case studies on specific teaching methods for entrepreneurship.

Three main elements emerge from the project:

• Beyond formal training, innovative solutions help in promoting not only professional skills but above all soft skills. The importance of tutoring, counselling and mentoring is essential for the development of non-cognitive skills, a “learn-to-learn” attitude and a growth mindset.
• Cooperation among institutions is already a key driver for innovation and success in VET: private, public, social initiatives. Most of the case, and their effectiveness in terms of students’ upskilling, is radically based in the cooperation among actors, trans-sectorial, inter-sectorial, and trans-institutional.
• Excellence in VET cannot be only for someone. It is worth-noting that most of the cases analyzed in the project deal with special categories of young people including dropouts, potentially dropouts, youngsters coming from underprivileged groups or even with crime experience, adults, often unemployed or underskilled. The real excellence seems to deal with the discover of the human and professional value of people, notwithstanding their problems and disabilities. This appears to be the road to a future social inclusion, for everybody.

Some of the outputs (case studies, scenarios, policy analysis) have been already published on partners’ websites, project’s website and on the Cometa Research website www.cometaresearch.org.

For further information on future events or for the final products, please send an email to Paolo Nardi (paolo.nardi@puntocometa.org) or Anna Dranikowska (anna@spoldzielnie.org).