UNDERSTANDING MY JOURNEY – Soft Skills Development for Young People

UMJ is a three year educational project implemented by non-governmental organisations in 8 countries: Croatia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the UK.

Our aim is to develop tools to support young people and youth workers in the process of conscious and structured soft skills development. We believe that soft skills are the key competences relevant for future employability of youth. However, those skills are the most useful and efficient only if a young person is fully aware of their development, understands how he can use them and has tools that can help him in the learning process. Gaining self-awareness and ownership of soft skills development is a skill in itself and we are here to provide you with guidance and methods on how to improve it.
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The objectives of UMJ project are the following:

-to improve young people’s engagement with and ownership of their soft skills development,

-to increase young people’s employability,

-to raise awareness of the importance of soft skills development.
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To achieve these goals we will:

-Identify the most important and relevant soft skills for young people, in terms of personal and professional development,

-Gain an insight into existing good practice in supporting young people to recognise achievement in relation to soft skills,

-Develop a toolkit that will guide young people to assess their achievements in terms of soft skills development and support them to recognise and articulate progress,

-Create a web-based application that will complement the toolkit, providing an interactive platform for young people to capture their soft skills development journey,

-Provide guidance for practitioners working with young people to support them to integrate the toolkit and ensure that young people are empowered to take ownership of their soft skills development.

All the results of the project will be available on the project’s websote. We hope that the tools and methods we will provide within the framework of Understanding My Journey will help young people to understand their journeys towards soft skills development.

Website: http://www.understandingmyjourney.eu/

UMJ app: http://umj-app.eu/