About

 2021-1-PL01-KA220-VET-000034866

Implementation period: 01.01.2022 – 31.12.2024

The main aim of the project is to enhance the quality of technical school education in Europe by implementing a tool to analyze the competency gap of students studying in professions such as construction technician, logistics technician, and renewable energy technician. This will be achieved by supporting schools in making teaching more attractive, including in remote mode, by developing solutions that will permanently improve the quality of teaching and align vocational education with market expectations. Developing a tool for comprehensive assessment of competencies in selected fields of study will contribute to bridging the gap between the competencies expected by the market from graduates and the actual scope of knowledge, skills, and attitudes they offer. This will be possible through continuous monitoring of both soft and hard skills of students throughout their education. Schools will be able to better prepare their graduates to entry into the job market, thereby increasing their attractiveness to successive cohorts. Teachers will be able to focus on identified competency gaps, and students will receive a realistic assessment of their prospects in the job market. Utilizing methods of multidimensional comparative analysis will allow the presentation of results in a graphical format that is easy to interpret. The project results will increase motivation among young people to take action and pursue various forms of further education. The results will also serve as a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of education and an opportunity to implement development projects to address any competency gaps. Thanks to the changes introduced in education programs/development of new training within development projects, there will be an opportunity for teachers responsible for them to achieve tangible results demonstrating the impact of these elements on bridging competency gaps. This will increase the willingness to carry out such actions - teachers will see the concrete effect of their work. As a result of the activities planned within the project, schools will gain a new metric (graduate competency profiles) to promote their own activities and emphasize the quality of their operations among potential students. Once this becomes popular, it will lead to improving the teaching process so that graduates of a particular school have better competencies than graduates of the same field from competing institutions. The project will also meet the needs of other staff in technical schools - career advisors and educators will receive a unique tool that will facilitate supporting young people in designing and pursuing career paths. They will no longer need to create their own research instruments or use various competency tests available on the Internet. The results developed within our project will also be targeted to employers, addressing their needs. On the one hand, they will have access to assessments of students' competencies from a particular school, allowing them to make decisions about strategic cooperation with that institution based on more substantive information. On the other hand, due to the universal nature of the tool, it will be easy to adapt it to the internal needs of a particular employer - for example, as a tool for assessing the level of competencies of their own employees in relevant industries. As a result, this tool has the potential to become part of creating career development paths for specialists in logistics, construction, and renewable energy sectors. Our actions will also respond to the needs of decision-makers in the field of local, regional, national, and European vocational education. By creating a specific solution for monitoring the competency gap of students in technical schools, we will show that there is not only a strong need but also a real possibility to change the way VET education operates in our countries and to introduce more competitive young Europeans into the global market.