During the 2017/18 academic year, five European VET institutes worked together on an eTwinning project. This collaboration led teachers who participated to share their concerns about the professional future of vocational training and education students at European level. The youth employment rates of VET graduates in Europe are below the target set by the European Commission (82%) and countries such as Spain and Italy have high youth unemployment rates.As VET providers, we are committed to making it easier for our students to transition into the job market. Our educational institutions face changes within the context of vocational education and training, as companies demand increasingly qualified workers and, more often than not, students have a mistaken perception of an ever-changing labour market. Furthermore, we face another challenge that is quite significant in countries such as France, Spain and Italy: early school leaving. As training centres, we therefore have a very important role in making VET studies more attractive so that they become our students’ first choice, thus contributing towards fighting early school leaving. Carrying out actual projects with international companies and partners helps us provide our students with an attractive learning environment. This project promoted the use of active student-centred methodologies where students played a leading role in their learning by conducting interviews, performing analyses, using digital tools and being creative.Being part of European projects also had an impact on the professional development of our teachers, improving their methodology upon sharing teaching practices with their European colleagues. Moreover, we need to help our students get a general picture of their professional future in the job market and prepare them by developing their soft skills or interpersonal skills for the workplace to ensure job success in the retail sector. Therefore, in order to bridge the gap between the needs of Human Resources departments and the skills of our students, we decided to carry out a project that would focus on the soft skills of our students to give them a key tool to boost their employability.Our main goals were: •To promote the iconic businesses in our cities among our students.•To develop the soft skills or interpersonal skills for the workplace of our students so that they can enjoy career success in the retail sector. Five countries were part of this project: Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia and Spain. We had prior experience working together and this helped us in establishing the lines of joint action and organising ourselves during the two years we worked on this joint project together.Each centre participated with a group of students (20–30 students per group). Among them, we had students with disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, students who were asylum seekers and students with special needs (one of them required the assistance of an assistant teacher during one of the LTTAs). The heterogeneity that internationality, parity and the different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of our participants brought made cohesion among the groups last over time with the help of social media.During the educational and training activities, 20 students visited other partners and 1 teacher from each centre accompanied the students. Each centre had a project team comprised of 2 to 5 members who collaborated and coordinated the project's activities and outcomes throughout the different phases we passed over the past two years. The LTTAs had the following blocks as the common thread:•Recognition, confidence-building activities among participants and organisation of international working groups. •Institutional welcome and presentation of the host centre as well as the participating centres.•Themed teaching/learning activities aimed at achieving the objectives set out for each LTTA.•Itineraries for the awareness of European culture through visits to iconic retailers in the host cities. •Presentation of the project findings to the public during the teaching/learning activity sessions. In addition, different activities were carried out over the past 2 years of the project to develop the following skills among our VET students: awareness of European culture, digital competence, autonomy and initiative, social and civic competences, entrepreneurship, business awareness, communication tools, interpersonal skills and creativity. Finally, we would like to add that this project helped to reinforce the teachers’ skills: •Interpersonal skills: the teachers involved in the project worked in a multicultural context, carrying out activities for students from different countries. •Learning to learn: the teachers were able to reflect on their own practices upon implementing new methodologies such as bringing entrepreneurship into the classrooms or gamifying learning. The most revealing outputs of this project were: •An educational game that can be found as a physical game and a web and mobile application for our students to learn—through the gamified way of learning—the use of interpersonal skills for the workplace in different situations that may arise while working in the sector. •A website, which contains the key outputs of our project including the two games: the downloadable physical game with a Creative Commons licence so it can be used by any school in Europe and access to the web/mobile app, which is particularly relevant now in the time of COVID-19, making gamified learning possible with proper social distancing. •Our freely accessible Twinspace, which provides access to the activities, posters, brochures and findings that can provide guidance to other centres that are in earlier phases of the project as well as provide guidance to educational institutions in terms of student awareness of soft skills.•A tour of the iconic shops in our cities to promote the cultural heritage related to historic retailers. Interviews of the shop owners, where the skills necessary to work in this sector have been highlighted. •A brochure on the itineraries for sustainable commerce in our cities.•A self-assessment rubric of soft skills and a poster that can be deployed in classrooms across Europe. •The results of project assessment from a survey. Regarding the main output of the project—the game on interpersonal skills for the workplace—, it can be freely used by other schools and organisations so they can download it and use it as an educational tool to teach and raise awareness of these skills. And its web/mobile app version makes it entirely accessible from anywhere on the planet, which is particularly relevant at this time when social distancing has been implementing across Europe as a measure to fight the pandemic. In terms of the project’s impact, at local level, our project had an impact on our students, teacher and schools, as well as the local organisations that helped us carry out the project. The companies we visited and interviewed realised that schools are already teaching and assessing soft skills, and so they shared their ideas on these skills that future professionals must have. This project brought together companies, shops and educational institutions, allowing them to learn from each other. At regional level, we shared the outcomes of the project with other schools as we participated in different educational and training centre networks, aside from the eTwinning platform. Over the course of this academic year and the coming ones, we will continue to refer to this project as workplace skills are demanded by the current European labour market. As the trend observed is that this will also remain true in the future, we will continue referring to the outputs of this project for a long time.At European and international level, we helped our students become active participants of European citizenship—tolerant and respectful of other cultures, ways of thinking and living, as well as understanding of the different cultural values of nations—, thus enabling them to feel closer to Europe.Lastly, it is worth pointing out that we hope to reap long-term benefits in terms of how our students for the coming years face and approach the labour market. This is because deploying the materials that are part of the outputs will affect their preparation and above all their level of awareness of workplace skills, which are absolutely crucial for their professional future.

The project STEPS4Schools deals with aspects of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) that should be introduced and promoted in the course of the project. In a first step, the aspect of sustainable tourism shall form the general topic for implementing aspects of learning business English, improving entrepreneurial skills (as marketing, tourism and project management), applying ICTtools and cooperating in an international group. In a second stage, the range of topics will be enlarged by dealing with further Sustainable Development Goals that will be chosen by individual schools on the basis of local requirements and topical interests. The 6 schools involved all have a vocational background although their profiles differ. By means of that, each school can contribute a specific approach to the topic and take care of a particular field of interest. Most of the teachers involved have a lot of experience in carrying out international projects and can contribute a lot of knowledge in various fields.The main aims of the project are to teach students about the UN SDGs. They should be made aware of the problems facing our planet but also that there are solutions to these problems. By pursuing these Sustainable Development Goals students should be enabled to make a valuable contribution to improving environmental, social and economic aspects of our societies and to pursue practicable solutions to challenges on different levels. Already as students they should be put in a position to assess information, evaluate reports and take responsible decisions for our future.Devising concepts in one concrete field - sustainable tourism - they should come up with practicable soultions that can be tried out and implemented in practice. The project shall empower them to gain the necessary skills and knowledge in order to be able to act as responsible citizens and take fact-based decisions. These are qualities that will also be important in their future professionsl lives.Furthermore, this project will also demonstrate that nowadays occurences have a far wider scope beyond the borders of the European Union. In an ever more interdependent world it is necessary to look beyond boundaries and be open for worldwide developments.To reach these goals of the project students will be invoved in various learning processes. They will increase their language proficiency in English, but will also be challenged to translate brochures and other content material into other languages or seek help from people capoble of that. This is necessary because of the internationalisation of toursim which calls for addressing touriists in their mother tongue.They will gain enhanced IT knowledge that will be needed for sourcing information, implementing tasks and disseminating project results. One special aspect in connection therewith will be the documentation of certain steps of the project, filmed material about the final results and the appropriate provision of this material for further use by stakeholders and other people interested. This will take the usual dissemination process one step further than previous projects and calls for speciel equipment and knowledge about application of videotaped media and related productions.On top of that, they will have to build up cooperations with stakeholders like travel and tourism representatives and other stakeholders involved in the field.They will have to learn how to organise and market events and projects and finally evaluate the outcome of these.Working with people not known to each other before and with disabled and disadvantaged people will pose a challenge, but also a great chance of learning both on an emotianal level and on an intercultural level. Finetuning touristic concepts to customers´ needs requires a lot of knowledge about certain aspects of culture and habits, therefore the exchange of knowledge and ideas on an international level between students is of utmost importance. The experience of working in an international group on a level of strong cooperation will provide invaluable experience for the students´ future lives and put them in position to act in an appropriate way. (We know about this aspect from previous project, where the compulsion to work together on an international level has proved very vital for the project.)All in all, the project will offer a valuable contribution to societies in Europe and supply workable solutions to various problems.

The project VET4SCAPE was a project for Higher Vocational Schools and wanted to improve the quality of that education. The title of the project refers to Vocational Educational Training for Skills, Competence and The Practice for the Economy. A similar project has preceded this one, the experiences from that project were implemented in this project. We implemented aspects laid down in the Declaration of the EU Ministers in charge of Vocational Education and Training for the period 2015 - 2020. (Riga conclusions 2015)There were basically 3 pillars on which this project was built. 1)The central part was to form junior companies in order to get hands-on experience with economic activities. The students gained experience with JA firms by planning and running these firms and exchanged their experiences with junior firms from the partner schools. Thus we will stimulated creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship for their further careers. They got a certificate for participation in the junior achievement scheme. The firms were presented during a short term training event at the end of the project period. The goal was to strengthen entrepreneurship, especially in countries where it is difficult to set up a start-up company. 2) A second aspect dealt with enhancing the competence in Business English. Students trained certain topics to go in for an LCCI (London Chamber of Commerce and Industry) certificate. On these topics the students went in for mock exams, which improved their abilities to communicate, negotiate and act in a confident way in an international business environment.3) The third pillar was to strenghten the students' transcultural competence and ability to cooperate in an international team. For that they compiled a list of advice about do´s and don´ts for particular countries for which they needed to cooperate internationally. To be successful in business you must know the mentality and the background of a culture of a country to be able to succeed.In a globalised world it is necessary to prepare our students for international activities as soon as possible. In this project students and teachers had the opportunity to get in contact with people from 6 other schools both directly and online.The project targeted students and teachers from 7 VET schools in the project countries and stakeholders in connection with the schools (companies, local communities, parents, supporting organisztions like LCCI and Junior Achievement). The teachers involved in the project had the opportunity to obtain further knowledge and competence through professional development. As economic activities are no longer limited to the national level, it is necessary to prepare the students for these activities on an international level and, therefore, we cooperated across borders (comparison of legal aspects for starting a business, salaries, educational systems, cross-border trade, etc.) The results were made available to any interested stakeholders both on the VET4SCAPE eTwinning platform,and on the project website https://vet4scape.wixsite.com/erasmusplus. Furthermore, we offered the results in teacher´s groups on etwinning (English as a second Language, CLIL) to gain as much publicity as possible.The main aim of the project was to get graduates who have undergone hands-on practical experience in the running of a real company and who have learned to cooperate in an international team. Furthermore their knowledge of business English has improved above average knowledge and the transnational competence has enabled them to behave and act in an appropriate way in business and regular day-to-day situations in project partner countries.

•The project ESCAPE is aimed at increasing the skills and competence of the students of the schools taking part in the project. This will be acomplished by joining students in international online groups to work on specific topics. We will also apply for being accepted as a project within the EUSDR (PA 09).•We compared curriculums from different countries to work out new teaching and learning materials for the subjects English, Geography, ICT, Business Studies, Ecology, Economics and Business Behaviour with a view to creating something like a curriculum for a Business Academy for the Danube Region. We offered students certificates for tasks and competitions they did take part in. We came together at training events where we dealt with 7 topics (transport, energy, environment, education, economy, tourism and employment). We tested the newly developed teaching material both at our own schools and in international groups during training events, and evaluated the outcome with the students involved. We investigated job creation schemes alongside national action plans. The outcome of the whole project should be better job opportunities for our students due to the international approach of the activitiesObjectives• Fostering tourism in each country• Learning to present assets and a create a positive image of your country• Getting involved in economic aspects, like promoting package holidays or certain local products• Learning how to fill in application forms • learning about job opportunities abroad – where to search for and where to find a job opportunity (e.g.on the EURES portal)• Increase in language proficiency• Intercultural learning in an intercultural team• Support for better integration into the EU• Raising awareness for people in need and supporting measures for charity projects • Transfer of educational knowledge by passing on teaching materials• Learning basic words of language of project countries and producing a basic guide for tourists • we learned how to fill in booking forms • we compared curriculums in different countries and try to pass on contents that work well to be adopted by the others. We offer this material also to other schools• we worked together with local chambers of commerce • we fostered an exchange of cultural aspects between the countries involved• each school got in contact with tourist information centres to source information about the region in languages of the partner schools • During each training event we learned some basic phrases of the local language.* We established a PR/dissemination group to make the results of our work known* On top of the multilateral meetings we held one training event just for teachers for special evaluation purposes and job shadowings and future sustainable plans for the time after the project meeting.* we worked with eTwinning, where we also integrated a school from Ukraine* we focused on the Danube Region for the cooperaton of further schools from further countries* by that we wanted to expand our activities beyond current EU countries and link up with candidate countries and others in the region* we were accepted as an official EUSDR programme project* we created awareness for the importance of the macro-economic Danube Region* we aimed at helping integrate economic activities in the regionWe communicated by • Bimonthly newsletters• eTwinning • a website created for the project* email and skype•Number and profile of participating organisations; 6 funded and 1 linked via etwinning•Description of undertaken main activities; (see training events)•Results and impact attained; (see European Project Results Platform)•If relevant, longer-term benefits.( we have a pplied for a follow-up project)