Unleashing SkillsMatch’s Pilots!
We are proud to share with you the first impressions of the initial Pilot - Design Together that helped define the platform requirements of the SkillsMatch project.
Additionally, we will inform you about our latest updates on developing the soft skills framework, our upcoming events and get to know our team members better.
The SkillsMatch Dissemination team
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Project in short
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SkillsMatch is a two-year project running from June 2018 to June 2020. The aim of the project is to develop an online platform which will help users adapting to the demands of the labour market, with particular focus on the support of Non-Cognitive (NC) skills.
SkillsMatch unique offer
SkillsMatch platform will offer users a self-assessment NC tool showing strong and weak points in relation to what is recommended for specific occupations, a personalized training itinerary including Open Education Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as a portfolio linked to open badges which will provide recognition of the new skills.
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Design Together - Summing up our 1st Pilot Workshops
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As part of the Social Innovation and co-creation approach Pilots will provide a deeper understanding of the soft skills issues. This will help shaping the intended soft skills framework and get new insights thanks to the participation of different stakeholders.
The first set of Pilot activities has been performed in Stockholm, Dublin, and Madrid during March 2019. We were overwhelmed by the 178 participants who showed a high level of engagement and enthusiastically attended the sessions and answered all of our questions.
Everything was planned from early February by the dissemination team preparing invitations and the marketing startup kit. Thanks to the great collaboration of all the work packages in preparing the questionnaires for requirements elicitation. WP7 did an amazing job in coordinating and designing the pilot workshop sessions.
'Thumbs up' to our Pilot Leaders from, Federación de Servicios de CCOO from Spain, Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed from Ireland and Korta Vägen from Sweden.
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Ireland Pilot Workshop
"The 1st pilot in Ireland was attended by almost 50 people and was expertly facilitated by the Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed. It was very encouraging to see the enthusiastic and positive response from participants to the SkillsMatch platform and what it hopes to achieve in terms of getting people back to work."
Lorraine Hennessy - Pilot Leader
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Spain Pilot Workshop
"The experience in the 1st pilot has been interesting and motivating to continue with the project, it has allowed us to know that there are enough interest and restlessness on the part of the possible users in being able to accede to a platform that evaluates their non-cognitive skills, so much for the search of employment as to maintain it or to improve it.
Although the pilot has allowed us to know the opinions on its features and functionalities, we will have to wait for the next pilots to have more concrete opinions."
Almudena Muñoz Velamazan - Pilot Leader
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Sweden Pilot Workshop
“Developing a digital platform to raise the importance of evaluation of Soft skills is a step forward to a more sustainable labour market. To launch and lead the first phase of the pilot has been a great opportunity to meet international professionals and know more about their needs. I hope that Skillsmatch will be one of the solutions to match the employers and job seekers by standardizing a way to evaluate NC-skills.”
Aida Faiz- Pilot Leader
"SkillsMatch is a great opportunity to develop soft skills and competencies and match profiles with up to date requirements on the labour market. I am pleased to be a part of an important social innovation project which is also urgently needed in our society and EU market."
Maria Hellsén - Pilot Leader
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Deliverables Submitted
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Summary of D4.1 Skills Match and the analysis of the methods, technologies and tools for acquiring and evaluating the NC skills
Workpackage 4: Measurement, validation and credentialization
The project has already developed a new framework for NC Skills. The NCSF is the results of an extensive work of literature review and mapping of the most relevant NC Skills models, reports and EU funded projects guided under the main reference of the ESCO, the new EU labor classification. A careful labour of expert review supported by solid statistics and conceptual and language analysis has led to a structure of 36 NC Skills with 7 clusters, complemented by precise descriptions and complementary sets of relevant buzzwords usually linked by stakeholders to the understanding of each concept.
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Summary of: D7.1 Monitoring & Evaluation Plan and focus group creation and tasks
Workpackage 7: Evaluation and sustainability
The research team investigated state of the art methods, tools, and technologies for each area of NC skills, and recommended a specific approach for each. These recommendations are intended to form the basis of the subsequent task of designing the solution for bridging the gap between existing technologies and methods for the validation of NC skills. Some of the challenges around measuring NC skills were explored, and a range of assessment options were reviewed. Based on the requirements of the SkillsMatch project and state-of-the-art approaches to assessment, the recommendation is to use self-assessment for the measurement of NC Skills. The report also recommends using self-assessment approaches that are valid, reliable, and reduce the cultural effects on the recommended assessment approach.
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SkillsMatch Team: Interview
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In this section, you will find periodically interviews of team members. In this issue:
Pooyeh Mobini, Project coordinator and WP5 leader (System architecture and development). She is Operations Manager, Senior Project leader, at Stockholm University-DSV computer science department-eGovlab.
Question: Why do you like this project?
PM: It always fascinated me how the triangle of Skills, employment and education should match and align to empower citizens to land their right job and continue their knowledge growth. This is one of the most interesting and at the same time complex matching systems to design and develop. This project is the continuation of our collaboration with our amazing consortium, which could be enough to motivate me to start any innovation action projects with them. It always gives me the kick that we are shaping the future of Europe.
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Spreading the word: recent events to make SkillMatch go public
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To raise awareness of SkillsMatch project and its aims in facilitating the work with soft skills, team members frequently participate in conferences and summits where potential stakeholders can be reached. Here’s where we have shown up since project kick-started in June 2018.
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SkillMatch has attended the following events:
- Learnovation Summit, Dublin, Ireland - October 3rd 2018
- eCF Council Final Conference, Brussels, Belgium - October 11th 2018
- CRUE Gerencia, San Cristobal de la Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain - October 25th 2018
- European Skills Conference on Digital Transformation and IT Professionalism, Brussels, Belgium - November 15th 2018
- Workshop: "Developing and validating the competences - Training actions on the informed and aware use of digital technologies for the education on the Global Citizenship" - December 17th-19th 2018
- Technologies in Education, 3rd. Hosted by Global Knowledge Academics and Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France -May 2-3, 2019
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eGovlab’s project ICT4YOUTHWORK hosted an event on “Youth Work in the Digital Era” on the 9th of May in Stockholm. The event invited youth workers and policy-makers to discuss digital skills around online youth work and presented the project’s results which can be found here.
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Project ADeAPTIVE, in which Eurecat participates, developed the article “Gamification as an Approach to Designing Adaptive and Motivating Learning Environments in Higher Education” Authors: Vesisenaho, M., Miakush, I., Nousiainen, T., Peltonen, M., de la Rubia, M.A., Gámez, A., Yanez-Mo, M. , Sacha, G.M., Subirats, L., Fort, S. It was presented in the Media Education Conference, 24-26th April 2019, Salla, Finland.
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CompLeap is building a prototype for learners. We are piloting a prototype for learners to visualize their past formal competences, express their interests for new fields of education and finally receive personal and suitable educational recommendations! Visit our prototype and learn more about CompLeap project.
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SkillsMatch Consortium
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Seven partners joined forces in this project: eGovlab/Stockholm University (Sweden), Eurecat (Spain), DMC Metrix (Ireland), Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), Everis (Spain), Fondazione Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Trinity College Dublin/Learnovate (Ireland).
The project is co-funded by the European Commission.
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