RISE

The idea of creating RISE has been bred after the volunteers of The Electronics Students League have taken note of the most recent studies regarding poor efficiency on the labour market of engineers’ leadership, public speaking and entrepreneurial skills. As our target group is represented by young people with high technical skills but low developed soft skills, we have done a lot of research on this matter and the conclusions were unfortunate: since the financial crisis started in 2008 the opportunities for young people to complete and develop their personal and social skills have been considerably lowered. For example, before 2008, in Bucharest, there were lots of training centres that could offer trainings in different areas of activity, among which soft skills. In the last past years, the crisis affected this field as well so the chances for young people to form at a professional level were highly reduced. Moreover, recent surveys reveal that there is an increasing tendency among employers to focus on the candidates’ soft skills more than on what their job requires to do: “The financial crisis and the last past years chances have led to serious debates regarding the criteria guiding the employers in their decisions. Right now, the emphasize is on the growing potential of the employees more than on their technical skills. More and more managers are unhappy with the lack of adaptability, initiative and communication in the working environment. That is the reason why they prefer to hire young people with greatly developed soft skills and pay for their training in the professional area.” mentions Madalina Balan, Managing Partner HART Consulting in an article on www.cariereonline.ro. In addition to, we can also add statistic numbers at the European level regarding youth unemployment: in Octomber 2013 there was recorded a 23.7 percentage rate of unemployment among under 25 years young people.
The purpose of RISE is to form the participants focusing on their soft skills for a larger perspective on the European labour market. In order to do that, the participants will work together in different workshops to attain their goal. The Exchange is designed to include two major parts. The first part is a presentation about leadership, entrepreneurship and public speaking created by participants using non-formal education. The group will be divided in 3 multicultural workshops, each of them dedicated to a specific ability so that in the end the public will learn from their presentation what leadership, public speaking and entrepreneurship are and how it can improve their skills on that. The key words are creativity, initiative, openness, team work. All the results, opinions, feedback, products will be used for creating a guide addressed to the community the participants activate in, as the second part of the Exchange.
The intercultural dimension will be an important part of RISE and will support the multicultural dialogue. In order to do that there are scheduled activities such as national evening, where each participating country will get the chance to present their traditional cuisine, costumes, music or dances.
The Youth Exchange will take place in Bucharest, between 21st – 29th of June 2015. We have decided not to organize an APV because of the new politics of the Programme. ERASMUS + does not cover all the costs of the APVs anymore so there will be problems with the transport, especially for the leaders who will have to pay for a part of their transport twice. Therefore, we will keep a very good communication online, on Facebook and Skype and we will keep you in touch with our places with images and video materials.