Empowering Long-Term Unemployed (LTU) Older Workers through Coaching and Personal Branding is an EU-funded project. It is running between September 2016 and January 2019 and is funded under the Erasmus+ programme for education and training. The project’s aim is to give older (aged 45 and over) people the opportunity to experience success through self-development, creative thinking and through exploring opportunities!
The challenge: Long-term unemployment and aging adults
Over the last years, long-term unemployment in Europe has swelled. Around half of Europe’s 25 million unemployed have been without a job for more than a year. Long-term unemployment affects almost all European countries, albeit not equally. For example, the problem is more acute in Greece, Spain and Italy where more than 60% of unemployed are long term unemployed (OECD 2014).
Aging adults are most affected and face increasing challenges in (re)entering the labour market, once out of it. Rising poverty levels aside, long-term unemployment also creates a vicious circle: skills and competences are forgotten, self-confidence and self-esteem drains. As a result, communication and interaction are needed to seek and secure employment.
The need: upskilling and increasing training opportunities
There is evidence that aging adults are expected to be a major part of tomorrow’s labour market. In this context, in order to increase their labour market integration and productivity prospects, they need to adapt to the changing requirements and highly competitive economy by qualifying, upskilling and updating their competences. However, this kind of strategic support and training is still very limited and, as a result, long-term unemployed older workers are often excluded from lifelong learning processes and held back from market (re)integration.
In this respect, there is an identified need to also improve the skills and competences of career advisers and guidance professionals, enriching and adapting their counseling and training techniques, including on personal branding or on improving self-development through methods, such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and entrepreneurship.
The project: support for upskilling and the delivery of personalised training
The project aims to:
- Support and empower long-term unemployed aging adults in a personalized manner, helping change their mindset, untap their strengths, skills and interests and develop a skillset to unlock their career potential
- Provide career advisors with new, more effective and individualised methods, techniques and tools to support unemployed adults
- Propose and promote holistic collaborative approaches to support and guidance, by developing methods and creating the conditions for tailored and personalised training, increasing individual future opportunities for adults
- Fosterpartnerships and exchange best practice at European level among private and public entities working with unemployed adults
- Increase the level of participation of adult learners to lifelong learning education and training
- Ensure the transferability of the delivery methods for tailored and personalised training, thus promoting exploitation and sustainability of the project results
The target groups: long-term unemployed older workers and career guidance professionals
The project addresses the identified challenges and needs of:
- Long-term unemployed aging adults for labour market (re)integration and
- Career advisors, guidance professionalsand trainers working with long-term unemployed aging adults for upskilling and updating their counseling and training methodologies by applying new, individualised and emphatic approaches, contributing to increasing adult participation in lifelong learning
The project also aims to involve related policy makers at local, national and European level and society as a whole.
If you belong to one of those target groups and would like to get involved to the project activities, register to receive our news and contact us!