In Albania, unemployment in the 15-25 years age bracket is twice that of the general working aged population (youth unemployment rate of 28.1% according to INSTAT official data, but 40.3% according to ILO standards for labour market statistics revised in 2013). Among young women and men willing to enter the labour market, those with lower levels of schooling are facing the highest risk of being unemployed. Graduates from Vocational Secondary Education are often positioned in those risky corners of the labour market. Labour market studies point out that the mismatch between skills and labour market placement is high and has posed influence on unemployment. To tackle the problem of youth unemployment the new National Strategy for Employment and Skills Development 2014-2020 clearly states the government’s commitment to generate more and better jobs for youth by helping them to become better prepared for the labour market. Dual system based apprenticeship schemes have proven to be a successful way of bringing education closer to labour market, narrowing job mismatch and facilitating the placement of young people in jobs after training. Against this background, the aim of the project is to identify a sustainable way of implementing apprenticeship as a systematic and rigorous work-place based learning scheme in Vocational Secondary Education. The development of a Roadmap for introducing a dual system based apprenticeship schemes in Albania will be one important outcome of the project. The project targets: (i) Youngsters, studying at Vocational Secondary Schools, (ii) Teachers and trainers, (iii) Businesses, (iv) Policy makers on education, employment, and tourism, and (v) International partners. The methodological approach for the project consists of three milestones, (1) in-depth analyses and feasibility study in order to support evidence-based policy making, (2) participatory policy making process, and (3) piloting as a validation method of policy measures’ absorption. The project will raise awareness on the role of apprenticeship in generating skills for labour and also build adequate know how to transmit and replicate this initiative in the system. The dual system based apprenticeship schemes as applied in Germany or other EU countries urge for a sustainable partnership between education and industry. The project actively involves businesses in the process of designing and piloting this policy with the aim that a sustainable partnership between schools and industry will be initiated. In the pilot phase the hospitality and tourism sector will be in the focus. The project will deliver a set of guiding documents, occupational standards, revised curricula as well as teaching and training materials in order to facilitate the implementation of apprenticeship schemes during the pilot phase, which will place 100 students as apprentices in companies.

During the 2017/18 academic year, five European VET institutes worked together on an eTwinning project. This collaboration led teachers who participated to share their concerns about the professional future of vocational training and education students at European level. The youth employment rates of VET graduates in Europe are below the target set by the European Commission (82%) and countries such as Spain and Italy have high youth unemployment rates.As VET providers, we are committed to making it easier for our students to transition into the job market. Our educational institutions face changes within the context of vocational education and training, as companies demand increasingly qualified workers and, more often than not, students have a mistaken perception of an ever-changing labour market. Furthermore, we face another challenge that is quite significant in countries such as France, Spain and Italy: early school leaving. As training centres, we therefore have a very important role in making VET studies more attractive so that they become our students’ first choice, thus contributing towards fighting early school leaving. Carrying out actual projects with international companies and partners helps us provide our students with an attractive learning environment. This project promoted the use of active student-centred methodologies where students played a leading role in their learning by conducting interviews, performing analyses, using digital tools and being creative.Being part of European projects also had an impact on the professional development of our teachers, improving their methodology upon sharing teaching practices with their European colleagues. Moreover, we need to help our students get a general picture of their professional future in the job market and prepare them by developing their soft skills or interpersonal skills for the workplace to ensure job success in the retail sector. Therefore, in order to bridge the gap between the needs of Human Resources departments and the skills of our students, we decided to carry out a project that would focus on the soft skills of our students to give them a key tool to boost their employability.Our main goals were: •To promote the iconic businesses in our cities among our students.•To develop the soft skills or interpersonal skills for the workplace of our students so that they can enjoy career success in the retail sector. Five countries were part of this project: Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia and Spain. We had prior experience working together and this helped us in establishing the lines of joint action and organising ourselves during the two years we worked on this joint project together.Each centre participated with a group of students (20–30 students per group). Among them, we had students with disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, students who were asylum seekers and students with special needs (one of them required the assistance of an assistant teacher during one of the LTTAs). The heterogeneity that internationality, parity and the different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of our participants brought made cohesion among the groups last over time with the help of social media.During the educational and training activities, 20 students visited other partners and 1 teacher from each centre accompanied the students. Each centre had a project team comprised of 2 to 5 members who collaborated and coordinated the project's activities and outcomes throughout the different phases we passed over the past two years. The LTTAs had the following blocks as the common thread:•Recognition, confidence-building activities among participants and organisation of international working groups. •Institutional welcome and presentation of the host centre as well as the participating centres.•Themed teaching/learning activities aimed at achieving the objectives set out for each LTTA.•Itineraries for the awareness of European culture through visits to iconic retailers in the host cities. •Presentation of the project findings to the public during the teaching/learning activity sessions. In addition, different activities were carried out over the past 2 years of the project to develop the following skills among our VET students: awareness of European culture, digital competence, autonomy and initiative, social and civic competences, entrepreneurship, business awareness, communication tools, interpersonal skills and creativity. Finally, we would like to add that this project helped to reinforce the teachers’ skills: •Interpersonal skills: the teachers involved in the project worked in a multicultural context, carrying out activities for students from different countries. •Learning to learn: the teachers were able to reflect on their own practices upon implementing new methodologies such as bringing entrepreneurship into the classrooms or gamifying learning. The most revealing outputs of this project were: •An educational game that can be found as a physical game and a web and mobile application for our students to learn—through the gamified way of learning—the use of interpersonal skills for the workplace in different situations that may arise while working in the sector. •A website, which contains the key outputs of our project including the two games: the downloadable physical game with a Creative Commons licence so it can be used by any school in Europe and access to the web/mobile app, which is particularly relevant now in the time of COVID-19, making gamified learning possible with proper social distancing. •Our freely accessible Twinspace, which provides access to the activities, posters, brochures and findings that can provide guidance to other centres that are in earlier phases of the project as well as provide guidance to educational institutions in terms of student awareness of soft skills.•A tour of the iconic shops in our cities to promote the cultural heritage related to historic retailers. Interviews of the shop owners, where the skills necessary to work in this sector have been highlighted. •A brochure on the itineraries for sustainable commerce in our cities.•A self-assessment rubric of soft skills and a poster that can be deployed in classrooms across Europe. •The results of project assessment from a survey. Regarding the main output of the project—the game on interpersonal skills for the workplace—, it can be freely used by other schools and organisations so they can download it and use it as an educational tool to teach and raise awareness of these skills. And its web/mobile app version makes it entirely accessible from anywhere on the planet, which is particularly relevant at this time when social distancing has been implementing across Europe as a measure to fight the pandemic. In terms of the project’s impact, at local level, our project had an impact on our students, teacher and schools, as well as the local organisations that helped us carry out the project. The companies we visited and interviewed realised that schools are already teaching and assessing soft skills, and so they shared their ideas on these skills that future professionals must have. This project brought together companies, shops and educational institutions, allowing them to learn from each other. At regional level, we shared the outcomes of the project with other schools as we participated in different educational and training centre networks, aside from the eTwinning platform. Over the course of this academic year and the coming ones, we will continue to refer to this project as workplace skills are demanded by the current European labour market. As the trend observed is that this will also remain true in the future, we will continue referring to the outputs of this project for a long time.At European and international level, we helped our students become active participants of European citizenship—tolerant and respectful of other cultures, ways of thinking and living, as well as understanding of the different cultural values of nations—, thus enabling them to feel closer to Europe.Lastly, it is worth pointing out that we hope to reap long-term benefits in terms of how our students for the coming years face and approach the labour market. This is because deploying the materials that are part of the outputs will affect their preparation and above all their level of awareness of workplace skills, which are absolutely crucial for their professional future.

The Public Interest Group, GIP, the Academic Delegation for European and International Relations and Cooperation -DAREIC- and the DAFPEN - Academic Delegation for the Training of National Education Staff- wants to strengthen together the development of adult continuing education within a concerted cooperation at the level of the academy open to Europe and international. Thus, We have set up a project for the mobility of academic executive staff: inspectors, heads masters, Academic Supervisors-Academic Directors of National Education Services, DASEN and DAASEN- Assistant Academic Directors of the General Secretariat Services, and Heads of Service in Rectorate or Departments. The objective pursued is a better response to the assessment of pupils from the primary to the end of the secondary cycle, based on the comparison of the practices and modalities of a number of educational systems in different European country. The executives and managers who will take part in the mobility, will do it through precise specifications given to them before departure. They will have as mission to observe, analyze and synthesize the elements implemented in the European countries, in the educational services and establishments regarding the modalities of the evaluation of the students/pupils from primary school - until the end of the academic cycle, through a very precise specification that is given to them upstream of mobility. Upon their return, experiments and proposals for changes in the academic system will come from these observations meetings and know-how elsewhere in Europe. This project aims to promote and promote partnerships in Europe between institutions, allow a specific dynamic for already existing partnerships and the implementation of new perspectives of collaboration. Project resolutely turned towards student success and comparative support of methods, it enriches the national perspectives by placing itself firmly in the practical application of the resources retained from the mobility with the partners upon the return of the mobility. Enabling actors involved in mobility in Europe to acquire complementary skills and learning, also means giving meaning to European citizenship and future partnership projects. 154 mobility’s are requested for the whole academy, which seems very much but which is small compared to the size of the academy, and of its personnel managers, but especially with regard to the development of the project and the requirements to achieve. The Academy has a total of 1493 management, inspection and orientation staff. So far such an international project involving such a dynamic has not been implemented in our local education authority and the expected effects are important since it will create a real awareness of different, complementary or similar work, but compared with educational and training diverse systems cultures (historical and social) in Europe. It will make it possible to realize the importance of working together to build a European education ment for the service of all students and to lead them, with the best conditions of evaluation and follow-up, to success while engaging them in the consciousness of belonging to a European community. A voluntarist valorization is already included in the project by the implementation of interactive demonstrations: feedback from experiences, communications in service meetings, use of academic and national platforms, seminars organized, highlighting individual mobility and making them otherwise visible and strong. The GIP FCIP and DAREIC will carry the project and manage it with DAFPEN. We have set up a work process focused on pooling and collective exchanges allowing a good management, the implementation and experimentation in the institutions, and finally the academic valuation, in the best conditions for the actors involved in the mobility. This action contributes to the academic objectives and aim to give students and staff all the assets to succeed in their personal and professional lives and to raise awareness of European citizenship.

The Education and Training 2020 Strategy wishes for a challenging 6% rate of VET students involved in a mobility experience abroad, compared to the current 0,7%. ROI-MOB springs from the idea that quality can increase quantity. But what is quality? All people say work experiences abroad are useful, enriching, favour employability, development of one’s skills, etc.. What are such statements based upon? Are there any studies or statistics about that declared worthiness, or better indicators to describe it and methods to measure it, in order to search for it from the very inception of mobilities and assess it downstream, to improve quality of offer, attractiveness to participants and companies, and to provide data to better focus mobility policies on EU territories?The topic is relevant, considering that in 2014 Erasmus+ KA1 VET co-funded over 3000 projects, involving over 126000 students, of which over 66000 in company training, worth over 264 million Euro. The topic is also a complex one (mobility is useful…to whom? students? companies? “the economic system”? should usefulness be measured as to personal training and development? employability? career perspectives? salary? overall “system” competitiveness?) and impacts also on non-technical, rather social fields (families are involved, as well as psychology, soft- and cross-skills, etc.).Recent and accurate researches are available on the Higher Education side, especially on the Erasmus programme. However, it looks like no up-to-date study and statistics are available about the “Return on Investment” in VET mobility, nor apparently did anybody try to describe it with a single value, able to represent, with proper weights, the range of dimensions and factors affecting it.In the above-mentioned scenario, ROI-MOB partners believe that:- European mobility is a key factor for the success of VET in the present economic and social context.- The success of European VET mobility is not just a feeling, nor does it relate only to emotional factors: precise indicators demonstrate it.- Knowledge and usage of such indicators allow design, implementation and exploitation of more effective and efficient mobility experiences, better fitting to the need for personal satisfaction and employability expressed by participants, for added value expressed by companies, for cultural and social growth expressed by the wider community.ROI-MOB identified and tested indicators suitable to measure the benefits brought by EU VET mobility (especially for 19+ years old participants, and EQF levels 4 and higher), compared to the ‘investment’ made by involved players (participants, schools and training centres, companies), by investigating affecting factors and devising methods and tools for turning them into success factors, with the aim of:- increasing quality in learning mobility;- attracting more participants to EU mobilities;- attracting more companies available to host EU mobilities;- supporting policies for mobility either at institutional and at provider/intermediary organisation level.The project started collecting data from different stakeholders in partner territories: Erasmus+ VET National Agencies, VET providers, companies and associations, students, etc..Collected data set the baseline for the definition of tentative performance indicators for the measurement of the ROI of EU VET mobility. Based on such indicators, partners planned and run a broad investigation round, actively involving a sample of over 1.700 stakeholders, and tested indicators on on-going mobilities.Collected data have then been analysed, indicators weighted and conveyed into a single, composite, statistical figure, and outcomes presented as a comprehensive system of measurement. A final consultation round among stakeholders allowed for assessment and adjustment.Main products are:1. A survey, documenting factors that are perceived as drivers to EU VET mobility usefulness by stakeholders.2. A set of indicators for measurement of “return on investment” in EU VET mobility.3. An algorithm to measure the “return on investment” of EU VET mobility in partner territories and organisations.4. A book, available in 6 languages, collecting all the above and offering guidelines to replicate processes and measures on one’s own, plus recommendations for mainstreaming findings into mobility policies either at provider and at institutional level.ROI-MOB has been developed by a strong Consortium, gathering eight partners from five European Union countries.

The Public Interest Group (GIP), whose purpose is the development of concerted cooperation at the academy level in the fields of adult continuing education, training and professional integration and management of European programs, in association with the Academic Delegation for European International Relations and Cooperation (DAREIC), which supervises and supervises the international development of institutions and services, has set up a group VET project for students and staff of the Toulouse Academy, called TOUlouse Mobilité and Ouverture Vers l'Employabilité: TOU.M.OU.VE, in partnership with 9 Lycées Professionnels ( VET schools) of the Academy. The GIP and VIOLETTE aims to promote international mobility throughout Europe and is part of a strong voluntarist approach to create a European dynamic in the academic institutions of the academy. In this respect, the group project wants to respond, through the international mobility of vocational institutions, to a territorial rebalancing in terms of culture and international opening phylosopphy. TOU MOUVE wishes to promote partnerships in Europe between companies, institutions and VET schools. European mobility and the expected impact will contribute to the success of the pupils of these vocational pathways, generating at the same time a better image of the sector and a revival of the motivation of pupils, which contributes to the fight against early school leaving (drop out). Allowing committed actors (students and staff) through mobility in Europe with new skills technics, and apprenticeships also means giving meaning to European citizenship and to future personal employment projects in Europe. 321 learning mobility’s (pupils and staff) are requested for 9 participating schools. They respond to upstream preparation work with all participants in a voluntary spirit of mutualization both in the management area and in the implementation of tools and collective documentation. In the annexes, there is a valid contribution from the partner institutions, which highlight their desire to work together. The publics concerned are mainly from sectors such as services to the person, woodworking, industry and hotel industry. The partnerships are numerous, involving more than 50 companies (host companies resulting from the pooling of the database) in 8 countries, various academic institutions (Germany, Norfolk in the United Kingdom, Spain), and finally professional institutions in Europe. The indicators concerning the impact for all the actors, in close collaboration with an expert service in this field in the local education authority, the CAFOC Center for Research and Development in Engineering Training, both locally and at the academic level, will measure the relevance of the step taken for the success of the program as for the succes of all persons involved in the mobility. A voluntarist valorisation is already included in the project by the implementation of interactive events highlighting individual mobilities and making them visible and strong (MOBIPRO, EUROPASS, Facultative Unit of Mobilité, elaboration of an European academic passport, Academic forum.. and all the communication and dissemination done by the VET schools themsselves). The GIP FCIP and DAREIC, which carry out the project and manage it with a management group issued from the 9 institutions (each of which has determined a referent), has set up a working process based on pooling and collective exchanges allowing management, implementation in institutions, academic valorisation and development in a conventional manner and under the best conditions for the actors involved. This action contributes to the academic objectives and the needs to give pupils and staff all the assets to succeed in their personal and professional paths and to raise the awareness of an European citizenship open to all and thus contribute to a better professional insertion in France and in Europe