Tell me about you 2017 brochure

Sarata Monteoru, Buzau, Romania 27 Feb – 8 Mar 2017

ABOUT “ Tell me about you ! “ is a youth exchange that happened in 27.02-8.03 2017 in Sarata Monteoru - Buzau, Romania with 40 participants from 8 countries: Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Macedonia, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania .The context is economical crisis in Europe with a great rate of unemployment that among youngsters is over 22% in every country. Youngsters have difficulties in preparing and properly presenting themselves in interviews for getting a job and also some of them do not have enough competences to access the labour market.

The aim of the project was to increase employability among youngsters between 1825 years old by developing key competences to provide a good quality for job interviews.

Proposed objectives are : - to offer to 32 youngsters between the age from 18 to 25 and 8 group leaders from 8 european countries a common space to reflect on their future unemployment, youth cooperation and cultural diversity.

- to identify the most appropriate key competences needed for getting a job and to be aware of their roles in the preparation for the job interviews.

- develop in common and to promote through non-formal education, new theoretical and practical models, and techniques in preparing and sustaining a job interview.

The activities foreseen for preparation, introduction and getting to know each other, to trust and encourage team building ,presentation of participants and organizations, introduction of Erasmus + programme and Youthpass certificate, cultural and study visits in surroundings and in Buzau, intercultural evenings, thematic and creative workshops, interview workshops, daily, midterm and final reflection-evaluations, dissemination and exploitation of results.

Besides there were transversal activities for visibility, management and monitorizing.

Final results were conclusions from workshops gathered in a brochure , 3 promo videoclips to promote models and techniques of job interviews , a facebook page and a DVD that contain results and informative and educational materials.

Tolea and Catalina Postovei 2

KEY COMPETENCES 1. Communication in the mother tongue. Communication is the skill to understand and express yourself in your own mother tongue language. Sometimes the foreign participants can learn some words in your language. For example, through intergalactic evenings, socializing and stereotypes.

2. Communication in foreign languages.

Communicate activly, improving your language skills, overcome the fear of making mistakes participating in presentations, team works and socializing with other participants.

3. Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology. There is quite a lot of counting and many technical matters in exchange projects, for example you have to make a budget for activity.

4. Digital competence. You learn how to handle the computer (sending e-mails or using MS Excel or other programs and making posters) or even learning how to play computer games.

5. Learning to learn. Everybody learn in various ways, sometimes you learn because you are in a situation in which you know you will learn something. Sometimes you can develop this competence by making yourself more aware of your own way of learning.

6. Social and civic competences. You can learn how to cooperate, how to handle people, and how to make a project a fun and unforgetable experience for yourself and others. Also making these projects we learn how to respect people and cooperate with them.

7. Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship. You can learn how to turn ideas in to success, realising your dreams and wishes, not waiting others to do it for you.

8. Cultural awarness and expression. It has to do with the way we appreciate our own culture and other cultures and also how to express emotions and experiences trough media or art forms.

3

LEARNING STYLES Every person have a different style of learning. During the project we had an opportunity to fill the Honey-Mumford test, to identify our characteristics of learning styles. There are four main ways to learn: 1. Activist. Activists are those people who learn by doing. Activists need to get their hands dirty, to dive in with both feet first. Have an open-minded approach towards learning, involving themselves fully and without bias in new experiences.

2. Theorist. These learners like to understand the theory behind the actions. They need models, concepts and facts in order to engage in the learning process. Prefer to analyse and synthesise, drawing new information into a systematic and logical 'theory'.

3. Pragmatist. These people need to be able to see how to put the learning into practice in the real world. Abstract concepts and games are of limited use unless they can see a way to put the ideas into action in their lives.

Experimenters, trying out new ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work.

4. Reflector. These people learn by observing and thinking about what happened. They may avoid leaping in and prefer to watch from the sidelines. They prefer to stand back and view experiences from a number of different perspectives, collecting data and taking the time to work towards an appropriate conclusion.

The most common style of learning for participants was reflector style, but the most uncommon style of learning is pragmatist.

4

Intergalactic awarness There are many different people of different cultures and countries in this project, and there were some activities where we discovered that there are differences but never ununderstandings.

For first, we made a theatre about the most known stereotypes about our countries. It was in the first days and it was good to understand what perspectives had every group about what people think about their countries. It was also very funny and there were very good moments and nobody had bad feelings about laughing about themselves. We learned that this stereotypes usually are not true and can be dangerous.

The real approchement was in the intercultural evenings, but we prefer to call them intergalactic evenings, because we do not want to put limits between persons and we are not as different as we probably could think. Every country presented another country, so we had to learn about them and we needed to be careful and to be respectful with them. We made some questionnaires and after that the fun began.

Everyone brought some food and drinks of their country, put costumes, showed their songs and dances. We ate and we started to talk and to dance, we discussed with others, things about our countries and we had an opportunity to get to know each other better. We were really together and we saw that sometimes our affinities makes easier to be together, but our differences can be overcomed if we just try.

5

FISH MARKET One of our tasks was to prepare some projects that we could cooperate in the future with. The “FISH” task was very interesting, because it made us think and to be creative. Every group proposed different topics and they were about – healthy lifestyle, corruption, cultural tolerence, discrimation, learning other cultures. Every team had a chance to promote their idea about some future projects and other participants had to vote about approval of projects and at the end all the projects were approved.

6

TEAM BUILDING During the team building activities we learned to be patient, listen to participant ideas and combine them, and cooperating all together to achieve a goal. The first team building was land art making, where we put all our effort to make a creative piece of art with things that could be found in the nature, but without hurting the nature. After every piece of art there was a story created by the participants.

The second team building was about protecting an egg. From some materials we had to build a contraption which would protect the egg when it is thrown from a 5 meter height. That was the part when we were desperetily waiting for the final results, but unfortunately we did not had any unbroken egg. Even though there was no unbroken egg, that does not mean that we did not achieve our mission, because the real mission was to work together, to respect each other ideas, to develop our team working skills.

7

BUSINESS PLANS Let’s do a business!

Setting up own business can be sometimes very difficult. But why not try it as game especially if there is possibility to do that in multinational enviroment? The task was to prepare a business plan in 7 different groups. Every team obtained form containing 4 steps which should be done in order to accomplish task sucessfuly.

First step was to simply define and explain ideas about how to do a business.

Next step was to specify the target customers. Third step was about developing a basic commercial strategy. In the last part we had to define how we should promote our ideas.

Every single team done those tasks differently and we all together created wide range of ideas. There was a team which offered a possibility to travel to Mars for a holiday or honeymoon. Another group developed idea of non – profit organization which produces uniforms and transfers profit to schools to provide better education for children. There was an idea about solving the rat problem in Australia by establishing a cat farm which would sell or rent cats, which would hunt overpopulated rats. Another idea was to open a special type of a restaurant which would offer multi-national cousine and traditional dishes. It is necessarry to mention the idea of cafeteria in which people could not only drink coffe but socialize, talk with each other and practise languages. One of groups made up an idea which incorporated setting up an enterprise which main purpose would be to organize events for wide spectre of customers. There must be mentioned an idea about bicycles, which could be shared by people in large cities.

8

During this work every team and every member gained a lot of experience.

We learnt how to develope business in the multinational teams. We also shared our ideas and thoughts with each other. For all participants was really benefitial to see how others think about problems and ideas.

What is really important about it is that we had a FUN. A lot of it.

9

THEATER STORIES Goran is a young macedonian skinhead who had been arrested for possessing drugs but later released. He’s unemployed and prefers to spend his time training his dog, doing body-building and being in the streets with his mates, who have been linked to several racist incidents. He wasnot interested in finding a job and rejected several offers. After some time someone offered him an opportunity to work as a personal trainer in the gym which is his passion.

Goran accepted the job and that changed his life.

Vanessa lives together with her sister Bella in Napoli in Italy. Their parents died when they were young, which meant that they had to leave school and work to support themselves. They are now grown ups, Bella is working hard and also looks after Angelica, who is a drug addict and often steals her wages.

Angelica finds it very difficult to control her addiction. One day Angelica gets into a hospital and met a local priest who inspired her to change her life.

Sotiris lives in Salonic, Greece. He has been ill for many months and lives of social security payments from the government. He used to work temporary as a bartender in a striptease bar. Two months ago his wife took the children away because he has AIDS. He is thinking to commit suicide. He started to attend meetings with psychologist and she changed his life.

Veronika is a nice girl from Brno, Czech Republic. She is 22 years old and just came from EVS from Italy. During EVS she met a nice boy, decided to come back and find job there. She explained the situation to her boyfriend Filip and her parents. Filip decided to leave her but Veronika’s parents throw her out in the street. Later Veronika realized her mistake and explained it to her parents and boyfriend which forgave her.

10

Richard lived with his family in Rezekne in Latvia. He is young and a very promising ice-hockey player. Richard’s father is unemployed, mother is ill and one of his younger brother is disabled. The only source of family income is what he gets as a hockey player. He received a scholarship in an America.

Richard accepted it and sent some money to his family.

Radu lives in Buzau, Romania. He had a problems with money that is why he accepted an offer from rich Russian man to distribute different kinds of cigarettes on black market. Later he stole some money from russian guy which found it out and made a deadline of two weeks to give it back. The right solution would be not to accept this offer in the first place.

Vasko is a musician in Sofia, Bulgaria. When his band splitted he moved to Holland and joined a band that used to live in unsafe way. Few months later he decided to come back to his country. On the way he had a car accident and he lost one of his hands. At the beginning he felt destroyed but then he felt in love with a nurse who helped him to recover.

Ricardo is a student in a college in Malaga, Spain. He has a girlfriend Sandra, who is working in a night club. She proposed Ricardo to apply as a guard in the same place. He accepted a job but soon the owners of the club discovered that he have connections with dangerous people. The owner reported it to the police. Ricardo's father is a politician in Malaga. Instead of immediately releasing him, he wanted his son to learn a lesson and left him in a prison for a few days.

The point of this task was to develop our social and public speaking skills, to use our creativity to find the solution of the situation. Participants got a script and based on it they made a performance creating differnet decorations, accessories and costumes.

11

UNEMPLOYMENT This task was made in preaparation phase before project, each team had to do a small research about general unemployment and youth unemployement rates and situation in their countries.

Similarities: ➢ Most interviews are face to face; ➢ It is helpful to have connections inside the company; ➢ Usually invitations are received via phone; ➢ All countries have deadlines for applications.

Differences: ➢ Invitations by the e-mail; ➢ Group interviews; ➢ Teamworking interviews; ➢ Sending a personal CV trough companies website. ➢ Quick approval; ➢ Informal interviews.

Unemployement rates: Country

General rate(%) Macedonia 23 Spain 18 Bulgaria 13,6 Italy 11,6 Latvia 9,3 Greece 23 Czech 5,5 Republic Romania 6

Youth rate(%) 57 42,9 43 34 18,3 45 10,7 20

12

Reasons: ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢

Lack of non-formal eduaction; Lack of experts; Corruption; Lack of internship.

Solutions: ➢ To improve employability skills; ➢ Promote entrepreneurship; ➢ Collobaration between the private sector and the govormental education system and NGO’s; ➢ Decrease of bureaucracy.

Conclusions: We had a research of unemployement in the participating countries, we compared the rates of unemployement and discussed about similarities and diferences between our countries.

13

INTERVIEWS The job interviews workshops were the core of our activities.We started early before exchange week, simulating interviews in our national groups and to understand some communication skills we need.

In Monteoru we have 3 different workshops with specific objectives to develop our skills and get our jobs. In couples we experienced how to be both an employer and a candidate, first simulating a phone discussion, then a skype one. Our positions wanted were IT specialists, hairdressers, business, managers, waiters, translators and we learned how to communicate, how to act and behave to make the best impressions.

The most funny and interesting interviews were “face to face” because we did not know who will be our partner and what will be the question, but we manged to answer and pass interviews to become cosmetician, shaorma maker, football referee, astronaut, DJ, beer taster, bodyguard or combat soldier.We increased our English, our selfconfidence, our way of having a proper appearance, power of improvisation and spontaneous reaction.

The final workshop with real experts in human resources was a serious test that can happen to us next week, next month and whenever we want to apply for a job.

Our testimonies stand as evidence that we worked hard, we understood and learned a lot of things and we are more prepared for labour market.

Deniel (Macedonia) : “During the interview I behaved like it was a real interview and I also felt that I am really applying for a real job”.

Tolea (Project leader): “The participants were amazing. If I will need in the future a secretary, a DJ or a bodyguard, I know who is the best!”

14

Observer- Kristine (Latvia) : “The interview was in diferent situations, very successful, in my opinion. Some of them were serious, but some of them were funny. I enjoyed observing them and we learned a lot.”

Anton (Bulgaria) : “Everybody improved themselves, now they are more confident, and they improved their English language skills.”

Dafni (Greece) : “It was a really interesting proccess. We learned how to face a simulation of an interview. It also was really useful for my future job interviews.”

Nico (Spain) : “I learned how I should behave in a job interview. It was really funny experience. As I was in the position of the boss, I learned how to control the whole interview.”

Observer-Angela (Italy) : “I think it was really useful. At first for experienced people in interviews, they learnt what to do and what to avoid, but also for people with no experience in job interviews, because they learn how to start their experience in the right way.”

Vlad (Romania): “At first I was a little bit scared and nervous, but it was learning experience, which was really important for me.”

Observer - Lucia (Spain) : “I think the participants worked as a team. They were not afraid to represent themselves. After these interviews they were more confident and even more closer to each other. Everyone was so creative and this was what really amazed me.”

Eliška (Czech Republic): “I felt comfortable in the position of the employer. I put an effort to do my best, so the interview could be as real as possible.”

Observer- Galina (Macedonia) : “They were shining with confidence, the creativity was really good and they have improved themselves. I was proud of them, because they were relaxed and motivated.”

15

CV WORKSHOP On the beginning of this workshop we were divided into 7 teams, which had to prepare a CV about the characteristics of a person. This is our output: “ Dear Colonel Sanders, I would like to apply for the position on CEO at your company KFC. I graduated in the Economical university in Narnia. I have participated in an Erasmus+ programme in Romania and I had done EVS. I worked in the fast food industry for the last few years and I would like to contribute to your company. “

“My name is Mama Dogenigga (lulu) Ikvadaconaia. I would like to apply for secretary of Mr. Donald Trump. I think I have skills and education requiered for this position. I have the right attitude to tackle stress situations and I am very responsible while working in a team. I think that in your company I will meet many active people and I am eager to learn new things and meet lot of people with similar interests.“

After reading about the job description on your company’s website, I was thrilled to discover that all the requirements you need from applicants, precisely - meet my academic achievements and work experiences. I would be very greatful for a chance to prove myself and look forward meeting you to discuss my application further.“

16

“As a person who has skills in acting, interation with kids and also fluently speaking plenty foreign langueges I would appriciate the oppurtunity to join your company. Please have a look at my enclosed resume for detailed information of my education and work experience.”

“ Dear Sir or Madam, I am applying for a job position as a penguins sitter.

As I graduated in a Batman university and considering my skills I would appriciate the opportunity to work in your company. Please take a look at my resume for more detailed information.“

“Considering my education and also my work experience, I think I would be the best candidate for your company. I fit this position because of my leadership skills, teamworking abilities and great flexibility“

17

CV WORKSHOP What was it like?

George from Greece ➢ How did the CV workshop helped you? „ It helped me to understand the proper way to construct a CV and wich information should be included for the relevant position.“ ➢ Did this workshop improve your communication skills and did you feel more comfortable speaking in English? „ It improved my social skills and it was a good experience to practise my spoken english.“ Elena from Macedonia „ I liked the CV workshop, we learnt step by step how to write it and to pay more attention to what it should include. “ ➢ Did you get enough time to finalize your idea? „ I wish we had more time to make a personal CVs for every person from our perfect team.“ ➢ How did you cooperate with your team? „I liked the team work and all of the participants. We managed to combine all our ideas in one beautiful CV for a princess.„ Cathalin from Romania ➢ Did the CV workshop help you? „The CV workshop was really useful for me and I feel more confident now.“ ➢ How do you evaluate this workshop? „I wish we had more time to finalize our concept of CV because we had the best idea! “ Elena from Italy ➢ Did the CV workshop help you? „It helped me a lot because I had never made a CV before and I loved our fictional character.“ ➢ Did your team cooperated well? „In the beginning it was difficult to cooperate with everybody but during the project we improved our social skills and team work.“

18

Nico from Spain ➢ What is the advantage of doing workshop like this? „The advantage was for unexperienced participants. They improved their knowledge about the construction of a CV. “ ➢ How did the CV workshop helped you? „I already knew how to write a CV but it greatly improved my social skills and team cooperation.”

This workshop was really important in our project because of its direct relation to topic of unemployment. The main objective of this workshop was to create a CV as a team and thus earn lot of knowledge. This workshop provided us a know-how to construct a CV, what it should contain and what are the crucial parts. We learnt what information is important to be included for specific position that we are applying for. We saw our mistakes and we learnt how to avoid them. Because of the variaty of nationalities, cultures, knowledge and age we developed unique ideas. Our skilled mentor provided really good feedback, based on his wide experience. Apart from this, we also improved our social and language skills. Even though every position was different, every participants showed great motivation and will to learn.

We had a GREAT TIME!

19

SENDING ORGANISATIONS Name: Volunteer Center Skpoje, Skopje,Macedonia Link: https://www.vcs.org.mk/ https://www.facebook.com/vcs.skopje/

Name: Youthnet Hellas, Athens, Greece Link: http://www.youthnet.gr/GR/ https://www.facebook.com/YouthnetHellas/ Name: European youth center Břeclav, Breclav, Czech Republic Link: https://www.facebook.com/EYCBreclav/?fref=ts

Name: Green Meredian, Rezekne, Latvia.

Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1485326051749475/?fref=ts

Name: Sikanie, Sicily, Italy Link: Name: Diabetes Prediabetes and metabolic syndrome,Sofia, Bulgaria Link: - http://www.credoweb.bg/sdruzhenie-diabet-prediabet-i-metabolitensindrom-profile-24911.html

Name: AS Hair Redivivus Buzau, Buzau, Romania.

Link: https://www.facebook.com/AS-HAIR-Redivivus-Buzau-Romania Name: AJ INTERCAMBIA – EUROPA ERES TÚ, Malaga, Spain Link: http://europaerestu.eu/tag/malaga/

20