The IERF, founded in 1995, an organisation providing training, career guidance and mobility accompaniment, proposes for consideration the CEDRES.S project – “European Careers for Recent Graduates of Secondary and Higher Education” – whose goal is to offer 100 participants from the Ile de France region a mobility road-map enabling them to acquire professional skills and improve their employability.The underlying methodology of its implementation derives from our previous experience on Leonardo, certified since 2009, and particularly MERIT, designed for young people of 18-25 years old with social integration problems, as well as CAMEP, designed for candidates for professional retraining. Of great benefit also is the experience gained in the context of CEDRE.S first presented for Leonardo 2013. This allowed us to develop programmes specifically for a post-student public, coming out higher education, not a priority group in our previous programmes. It has also inspired the title given to this 2014 project, which seems to fit our target group.Whilst CEDRE.S is clearly structured in terms of phases and apprenticeship units, its overriding purpose is to encompass and improve the professional capacities of participants of level V to I, who have left either secondary education, higher education or full-time training of any sort within the past year. It would offer them an “à la carte” programme of qualification, embracing different job skills, technical linguistic capacities and intercultural exposure, all designed to meet the individual’s specific needs at the time.One of the principal advantages of the teaching programme resides in the cross-fertilisation between these 3 aspects which make up the whole experience. To help the students attain this goal, we have devised two mobility “road-maps”: the first lasting 6 weeks, particularly geared to young people in integration from level V to II, the second of 12 weeks targeted at participants of a higher level, either older or with longer professional experience. Whilst the periods of mobility can vary, the teaching plan contains the same stages and objectives:1. Pre-departure: collective socioprofessional guidance sessions accompanied by individual assessments. Intercultural and language preparation.2. Abroad (outside France): practical internship in a company meeting the profile or personal project of each participant, with constant monitoring to measure linguistic and professional progress, certified by Europass and level tests.3. On return to France: session to assess what has been learnt from this experience, followed by accompaniment during 3 to 6 months to allow the participants to:- Develop their capacity to summarise and explain in their own words the key skills acquired in relation to the specific professional context they have chosen.- Learn to identify what experience and training is most relevant to maintaining a competitive professional profile on the job market, this in a logic of “Long Life Learning”.- Acquire a continuous ability to judge their own progress, their technical, linguistic and intercultural skills, hence enabling them to position themselves to advantage vis-à-vis European or international recruiters.- Identify concrete employment opportunities: a major indicator of the impact of our project is integration in the job market within 6 months.We have built a partnership network with 9 experienced intermediate organizations in 8 different countries to ensure optimum welcome and logistics for participants. Clear specifications are drawn up with appropriate norms against which performance is measured, supervised by the IERF and a Piloting committee. Choice of the partners reflects level of demand by country; English and Spanish-speaking destinations tend to dominate language-based requests, but other countries are selected as a function of specific sectors.To encourage initiative, evaluate results and publish them, we have created a federation of 25 centres located throughout the Ile de France region, which in turn embraces 150 organisations, whose vocation it is to assist this public in obtaining employment. The Region itself is also an active partner in the project: its involvement since our foundation, “guarantees” the quality of our services and will help us to enlarge still further our partnership networks to other teaching organizations or local authorities. It will accompany us in the renewal of our request for certification of the project in May. It should also support the creation of a Consortium within which IERF will be the coordinator for the category of New graduates of higher education and full-time training. This is ongoing and should be accredited by the end of the year.

Gecko Programmes, in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, delivers training to people who are or aim to be employed in the creative and services sectors. Gecko is leading a consortium of FE colleges in the Birmingham and the Black Country conurbation with numerous college sites across all of Birmingham and also includes Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley, Stourbridge and Kidderminster and Solihull. This project sends 138 learners who are studying or have completed studying a curriculum relevant to the creative and services sectors to Spain, Italy or Germany for 22 days, 40 days or 60 days. We will also send 5 staff from the UK consortium members for work shadowing with EU partners, and also host 5 staff from the EU partners with consortium members for teaching assignments within our VET organisations. In Europe, the project works with our six receiving partners, who each deliver our Enterprise and Employability curriculum in a manner common across the projects, and monitor progress and recognise achievements in a manner common across the project. The project is innovative; connecting a network of UK VET organisations in the Midlands to leads of VET networks in our destination nations. During the mobilities the learner participants will develop their enterprise skills and employability and take part in a work placement with one of the partners. This will develop their skills and competences in marketing, event management, tourism, hospitality, catering, ICT, creative production, exhibitions and promotions, restoration, export management and leisure. The participants will develop a wider awareness of the chosen industry, improve their transferable vocational and soft skills, demonstrate initiative, build entrepreneurship, confidence and self-esteem, declare aspiration through their career development plans (job prospects) and improve their language skills and cultural awareness. We aim to boost employability, with participants gaining the sparkle they need to compete in the current job market - attaining the job they want, and being able to manage their own career development as a citizen of Europe. This economic activity benefits communities - communities looking inward upon themselves and gaining cohesion with active players, and looking outwards as a community or people, projects and employing organisations that each gain an European perspective. We build on Learning Plans by devising individual development plans that declare goals for self-development and ways of working in new teams and for new projects. Learners are supported to be entrepreneurial and to gain confidence and presentation skills. The project lays the foundation stones for a Midlands consortium that comes to include all FE colleges and their sites . Gecko and three of the college partners established the consortium in 2015, developed with two ore partners in 2016, and now joined by two more FE colleges. The project impacts upon all consortium members, supporting them to develop their own European Development Plans and to enhance the curriculum and the learning experience.

The objective of the ENTREDU mobility project was to develop key competences - knowledge, skills and attitudes of our lecturers in the field of implementation of elements stimulating entrepreneurial spirit in students and listeners. As an indirect goal, we set the transfer of foreign know-how and examples of good practice.The content and scope of the project was to make one mobility activity at the beginning of June 2018. This trip was attended by a group of professional lecturers to our project partner - the Italian organization CEDIT. During the weekly stay (6 days of work programme, shadowing activity), lecturers from all over the Czech Republic had the opportunity to visit colleagues abroad, monitor their work practices and through shadowing to study their teaching methods, consult their own practice and learn from their examples of good practice.Twelve participants, lecturers, with whom the Association has long been cooperating on a labor basis, have been selected for the programme. From the point of view of their professional profile, in most cases they were university pedagogical staff. The group was fairly gender balanced, with a total of 7 women and 5 men attending a foreign trip.In terms of the results and achievements of the project implementation, the lecturers have significantly improved their knowledge and skills important for teaching entrepreneurship during the foreign trip:- project management skills;- pedagogical competencies;- personal skills, such as active listening, negotiation and teamwork skills, ability to create an appropriate learning environment.In addition to the above, other competencies of the participants, such as communication skills in terms of improving language skills - communication in a foreign language, and organizational competences associated with going abroad were improved.Impact on participants is mainly on the level of competence improvement. The impact on our organization is most evident in improving the expertise of pedagogical staff, thereby also improving the quality standards of the training courses / seminars of our Association. Another impact was the increased level of internationalization of the organization. The implementation of the project has relapsed and intensified communication with a foreign partner with whom the Association worked intensively in the past to exchange experiences and examples of good practice in support of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Entrepreneurship has been highlighted as a key action by the European Commission as a powerful driver of economic growth, job creation and innovation. Recent communications from European Union are clear: Europe needs more entrepreneurs. However, entrepreneurs still lack the basic cultural and educational conditions to compete on a worldwide market, and more investment in entrepreneurship education is needed. To reach these goals, formal education is not enough. Ideas are put into action when learning is supported by direct experience of the economic environment.The ENDuRE Knowledge Alliance designed innovative approach for the education of new entrepreneurs and support aimed at increasing resilience and competitiveness of European startups.Academies and companies worked together to face the challenge of reducing probability of failure in startups, helping existing enterprises grow quickly and overcome the “Valley of Death”. The project designed and developed a holistic framework to transform ideas into technically and economically sustainable businesses. ENDuRE mixes learning by doing, cross-border collaboration and the strategic support of new startups by successful companies in a win-win environment. Its key features include innovative solutions in technical opportunity scouting and market/technology assessment; pretotyping, conceptual design, and reinforcement of products/services and business models; IP mapping, and competitive intelligence analysis; advanced prototyping of products/services; field support through knowledge exchange and startups’ full immersion within hosting companies. After three tests within a European network of academies and business players, a set of educational and practical tools are now available. They are aimed at guaranteeing the reproducibility of the approach. The educational and training materials are available on the project website for target stakeholders to be transferred in different programs, as well as to be used at different stages of the start-up growth.

The fifth edition of our Erasmus+ program « Carrières Européennes pour les Diplômés Récents de l’Enseignement Secondaire & Supérieur » concludes with really positif results as we reached the projected objectives announced in the application.First of all, instead of the 100 internships initially scheduled, we organised 103 placements for vocational trainees from the Ile-de-France region. We organised 1274 mobility weeks, overall type of departures. These on demand pathways lasting from 4 to 26 weeks could answer more efficiently to the professional and personal needs of the candidates. In total, this project represents more than 1500 hours of information, orientation, departure preparation, monitoring and capitalisation of the experience. To enable candidates to leave on the most appropriate moment in their integration pathway, our proposition forecasted group departures and individual mobilities. In line with the propostion’s projection, 24 candidates joined 3 group departures from 12 to 16 weeks: 2 in the United-Kingdom and one in Spain, with the collaboration of three intermediary organisations. 79 candidates departed individually with direct host companies contractualisation. The only change regarding our recommendation can be found in the type of mobility: we initially planned only short mobilities. However, during the project, we were able to save, as we carried out mobilities shorter than 91 days. These new available means were redistributed and 14 candidates could integrate the « ErasmusPro » path.Just like for the 2017 edition, the 103 grants were allocated in only 18 months, instead of the contractual 24-months. These results are very positive as it shows that Erasmus+ is more and more famous and suggested. Applicants are more willing to enter the program and employment counsellors to advise it.In our application, we mentioned a main objective: boost candidates’ professionalisation, giving them the opportunity to improve their linguistics and professional skills and their professional capacity in work situations, and to participate in the development of competitive professional profiles, adjusted to the evolution of the labour market and the companies of the territory. The relevant results can be presented as follows: 77% are working and among them 15% in the country of their internship (Spain, Italy, Tcheque Republic, Portugal and United Kingdom). 11% of the participants chose a mobility path to improve their linguistic skills and gain in experience to continue their studies. Only 12% of the participants are working on short-term missions and/or are still looking for a permanent position. This is really positive, if we consider that about 30% of the participants back in France were confronted to an economical stagnation due to the health crisis in Europe, during the first 2020 semester.To finish, a last word on the objective we are targeting since 2015, thanks to the impact of the CEDRES project, the simplified procedures for the renewals, and the institutional legitimation born with the Erasmus+ Charter. Since 2018, IERF coordinates the Consortium JEEME. This project which is already in its second edition aims at offering targeted mobility schemes to candidates working on their integration pathway, living in the conurbation of Est Ensemble, in the Seine-Saint-Denis departement.The impact of these two projects is above what we expected: since november 2019, a new Erasmus+ Consortium under the aegis of the DIRECCTE 93 is in its first phase. To conduct this implementation, IERF gave up on the reconduction of the Erasmus+ Charter in simplified procedures and applied for a new Charter in October 2020. This new Consortium will express the needs of the coordinator and of more than 10 member organisations, targeting usual candidates, vocational trainees and new one: young people in pre-apprenticeship, young people and adults in apprenticeship and qualification contracts. The first step is taken. We now hope that this demand will be accepted to then apply to the Erasmus+ call for projects in 2021.