TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for ilias karachalios
The aim of the TC was to explain the essence of the Innovative Manual and give practical directions to the participants on how to utilize it in youth work. The youth workers deepen their understanding of mentoring and entrepreneurship, and how these two fields can be synchronized for mutual benefit. Through simulation, participants enrich their skills and gain practical tools of mentoring, working with young people, understanding their needs, helping them to set personal development goals and making action plans to reach their goals. They also learn about the importance of attitude and behaviour for being able to encourage and influence entrepreneurial thinking among young people.
The needs that were addressed in this training were related to entrepreneurial training for Youth Workers in order to be able to behave as Mentors Fostering Entrepreneurship among youngsters of their organisations.
According to International Labour Organization, Armenia leads youth unemployment in CIS states with 39,1% and Georgia with 34.1% in 2015. Youth unemployment in Estonia is rather persistent with 13.1% higher than the prime age workers. Italy has EU's highest level of youth unemployment: almost 1 in 5 young Italians are neither employed/job-seeking nor in full-time study, according to an EU-wide report. Increase in youth unemployment has serious consequences on economy as young people are key-resource for economic growth. In case of long-term unemployment, youth are discouraged to even look for a job which generates psychological impact and loss of professional skills. It effects on poverty, quality of life, equity and decrease of demand for goods.
In spite of the actuality of the topic, there is no specific partnership among public/private/business sectors to foster entrepreneurship and youth employability in local areas of partner organizations. Usually various services/opportunities are available for young people, but there is no mentoring of personal development in entrepreneurial field. Here the role of participating organizations is of great importance, as they all aim to foster socio-economic and educational development based on their rich experience in the field by using cooperation and non-formal education tools. Consortium identified a common need for partnership for employment through discussions with the target groups. Young people of 4 countries had similar challenges: unemployment, unawareness of entrepreneurial and educational opportunities, lack of self-esteem and vision for personal development. In fact, the idea of mentoring in the field of entrepreneurship was put forward by young people who mentioned the need of a person who would help them to find their potential and motivation to search/create a proper job for them. Summing up the needs of young people, Consortium joins its forces to enhance organisational capacities through providing innovative service to young people by mentoring them for self-actualization-development, gaining life skills, finding jobs and starting their own business.
20 participants form Italy, Georgia, Estonia and Armenia were participate in this Training course. All of the participants were active Youth Workers in their organisations and they wanted to develop skills, as mentors for helping youngsters get employed.
In this TC I use non formal education methods, like energisers, ice breakers, team building activities, theatrical play, and we work in teams presenting our work to the rest. For example we present in 3 groups using theatrical performance, what is formal, non formal and informal learning, or we develop our own start up business ideas that we present in front of potential investors seeking for funding, etc.
The training activity achieve to help the training participants learnt how to pitch their ideas, work hard on them, practiced them and made the pitches in front of a jury. Thus they not only learnt how to come up with ways for meeting young people’s needs, but also acquired techniques for pitching, and may help their mentees to prepare pitches if needed.
This TC was a success because it was stated in the evaluation form held on the last day where it was clear that youth workers were ready to start their mentoring process with their youngsters each, with great enthusiasm.
List of publications:
https://armavirdc.org/medias/Youth%20Workers%20as%20Mentors%20Fostering%20Entrepreneurship
My role was the main trainer of the TC and with the assist of Emma (an employ of ADC) we implement the whole program of the activities during this Training.
The trainer presented high professionalism both for preparing the training and implementing it. The activities were targeted and to the point, at the same time interesting and including all the participants. Within 7 days all representative youth workers were trained as mentors in the field of entrepreneurship and successfully practiced their skills during the next 6 months. The cooperation with Ilias was smooth and productive, and his skills and efforts were very much appreciated.