COACH@WORK: Supported employment job coaching programme
EQAVET system for recognition, validation and accreditation of Supported Employment providers of people with disabilities
People with disabilities (PwD) are the most disadvantaged group with regards to employment. Currently in the Bulgaria their number (age 18-29) is about 227 000 and more than 60% of them are unemployed. In Turkey they are 273,915 and only 15% are in employment compared with the national average of over 80%. In Austria they are around 850,000 and only 19% are employed and in Spain they are 3,847,900 and only 11% of them have permanent job.
It is one of the key areas of both European Disability Strategy 2010-2020 and Europe 2020 to allow full accessibility to education as well as to the labour market for people with disabilities. In many European countries and beyond accessibility to the labour market is still not given because of the lack of suitable and powerful implemented support concepts.
The impact of the Supported employment (SE) approach (a method of working with disabled people and other disadvantaged groups to access and maintain paid employment in the open labour market) have been identified in previous T-EST project (LLP-LDV-TOI-12-AT-0011) as very beneficial to the PwD and during its implementation phase it gives clear quality improvement of the accessibility to the labour market for those targets. However during this process the partners discovered the need for development of dedicated VET programme for training of Job coachers of people with disabilities which does not exist so far in Europe as officially accredited job profile.
The COACH@WORK project will continue supporting the inclusion of the Supported employment approach in Austria and Spain, but also in new countries such as Bulgaria and Turkey where this will be done for the first time by developing EQAVET system for recognition, validation and accreditation of their knowledge, skills and competencies.
Those learning outcomes will be in connection with the dedicated unique ECVET training programme for SE providers which will cover:
Disability awareness;
Acquisition of key & transversal competencies;
Application of interactive technologies and methods in coaching process;
Mainstreaming and digital technologies usage by PwD;
Supported employment basis;
Pre-employment support agenda
Dedicated training materials (for PwD job seekers) related to all aspects of seeking employment: preparing for interview; completion job applications; disclosure of disability; presenting a professional appearance; analysing strengths and weaknesses; accessing further help and resources etc.;
Career guidance and labour market methods.
This COACH@WORK VET programme will be accredited by the national body (NAVET) which will happened for the first time in Europe in that field. This training programme will be followed by piloting implementation phase as well as will establish a network between 54 employers of PwD that will complete a memorandum of understanding for the further exploitation of the project outputs.
Start date: 01 September 2014
End date: 30 August 2017
http://supportemployment.eu/ -project web-site
Output:
Project concept, expected Intellectual outputs (IO) and work plan
Project management & implementation activities
NAVET – Data analysis – Research among the VET centers in Bulgaria
NAVET-EQAVET framework and indicators
“Coach@Work” – Project brochure
