What’s up with the Newcomers@work project?

The NEWCOMERS@WORK project is aimed at a group of young migrants, the so-called NEETs (not in education, employment or training), i.e. young people aged 15-24 who have migration experience and remain outside the employment and education sectors. The main objective of the project is to strengthen the employability of young people. Newly arrived refugees or migrants throughout Europe encounter many obstacles in finding decent employment, such as: low language skills significantly limiting their choice of profession, poorly developed professional skills, lack of support from family and the target country, and insufficient knowledge of the rules and cultural scripts in a given country.

Supporting such people directly, but also the educators working with them, was the basis of this project.

The project is co-financed by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union and has been implemented as part of international cooperation since autumn 2022 with the participation of seven partners from six different countries: PRISM IMPRESA SOCIALE S.R.L. (Italy), Athens Lifelong Learning Institute – Civil Non Profit Organisation (Greece), Social Impact Development Centre (Luxembourg), AMADORA INOVATION EM UNIPESSOAL LDA (Portugal), Asociatia Institutul pentru Parteneriat Social Bucovina (Romania), Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland) and the Foundation for the Development of International and Educational Activity – FRAME (Poland). The partners have diverse experience and profiles of activity, complementing each other in this international partnership.

The last of the project meetings took place on 19-21 February 2024 and was organized by one of the project Partners – Gdańsk University of Technology. The aim of the meeting was to present, test and discuss the next stage of the project, which is called Work package 2 – Development of the Newcomers@Work Curriculum and is a collection of several dozen workshops to be used in the target group of the project. The workshops cover four extremely important topics from the perspective of young migrants struggling with the problem of lack of employment: Needs of NEETs, Language and digital skills in the context of employment, Soft/life skills for employment and Creating synergies. An extremely important element of this Partner meeting was the participation of invited Trainers and educators working with migrants on a daily basis. Their voice was a valuable contribution to the further development of the project.

We are currently finalizing Work package n°2. We have conducted a 3-stage pilot (internal and external with the participation of both Trainers and NEETs themselves). The collected comments and suggestions are now being implemented, and the Partners are preparing the final versions of the Curriculum. At the same time, the entire partnership is dynamically involved in the preparation of Work package 3, i.e. the development of a collection of digital tools that will help employers prepare themselves and their teams to employ people of different national, ethnic and religious origins. For this purpose, we have collected existing tools, developed our own ideas, and now we are holding meetings with Trainers, which are to help us determine the best formula for conducting workshops and will allow us to collect valuable feedback on our work so far, in order to best develop effective and useful tools, and thus provide support to both migrants and potential employers.

Keep your fingers crossed!