First I-LINC project panel on youth employability
Theme: Empowering youth for employability
for either. More soft skills training is needed for young
Panelists:
people. As Manus Hanratty form Fit Ltd Ireland put it
• Andrea Parola (European E-skills Association,
Belgium)
• Ave Lauringson (Estonian Ministry of Economic
“From the perspective of unemployed
Affairs and Communications)
youth, employability is like a wall
• Manus Hanratty (Fast Track to IT, Ireland)
that stands between young people
• Maria
Garrido
(Information
School's
and a good job. But breaking it down,
Technology & Social Change Group TASCHA,
University of Washington)
employability is essentially about
• Kosta Andric (ICT Hub Belgrade, Serbia)
knowledge, and competition and
skills - all of which can be learned.”
13
After the lunch break, Telecentre Europe’s annual
conference continued, this time with an interactive
panel discussion on the topic of youth employability.
The session served to provide the perspective on
youth employability from five different stakeholder
groups: companies, entrepreneurs, policy makers,
researchers and training providers/telecentres.
The aim was to initiate an open discussion within
the telecentre community and continue the
conversation on the new platform created by the
EU funded I-LINC project, a portal that organisations
and individuals can join at www.i-linc.eu. After
the panel discussion, I-LINC Project Manager
Laurentiu Bunescu presented the newly created
I-LINC platform and invited stakeholders to join.
Often young people are unaware of the unwritten
“norms” in the world of work where designing a
good CV or knowing how to dress and speak about
yourself may be the deciding factor for a candidate.
This
is
why
successful training
programmes
place soft skills at
the same level as
hard or technical
skills (e.g. www.
FIT4jobs.eu) and
why young people
need mentors or
advisers who will help them throughout the journey.
Employability: A set of skills, with soft skills on top Education to attract children to technology and
computational thinking
Panelists agreed that soft skills are as important as
hard skills for the work environment today, but formal Within formal education a stronger emphasis on
education is not preparing young people sufficiently STEM subjects or general logical and computational
skills are needed. In Estonia for example, this is the