"<< Background >>The project is a follow-up of a previous Erasmus+ project called Virtual DS. This project was realized by our partner from the UK and is the only one with experience in virtual reality in the Supported Employment process. This project brought a very innovative approach to the field of Supported Employment for people with disabilities. Within this project, the partners created guides concerning Supported Employment and created an online platform that enables people with down syndrome to learn about five different jobs via virtual reality scenarios. The scenarios were developed by an external supplier. Supported Employment counsellors know how to use them. Since that flaws of this highly innovative concept have been discovered. This project will work with the gained experience and develop it further. The main difference will be not to use only a limited count of scenarios but enable the counsellors to create and adjust the scenarios according to the ever-changing needs of their clients, employers, and society in general. This way the sustainability will be secured despite the rapid technical progress. The Virtual DS project proved the efficiency of using Virtual Reality in the development of skills. Area of Supported Employment for people with disabilities and Career Counselling for disadvantaged people needs to step into implementing Virtual Reality into their practice as much as possible to have comparable results to other areas and secure good and sufficient support for the inclusion of their clients.<< Objectives >>The project is prepared by the partnership consisting of Supported Employment agencies and Career Counselling providers. Partners have different levels of experience and one of them, from the UK, already has experience with using virtual reality in their practice. This partner´s experience shows the benefits of using virtual reality in the process of Supported Employment. These benefits exactly meet the needs of the Supported Employment agencies and their clients - people with disabilities who want to work, with the focus on students or recent graduates of schools with special educational needs or young unemployed people with disabilities. They will be better prepared for their jobs and it will be easier for them to keep the jobs if virtual reality is implemented in the Supported Employment and Career Counselling process.Agencies encounter situations in their work with clients which cannot be tackled in a real and safe environment. That´s why using virtual reality in their practice definitely widens the possibilities. The benefit of using virtual reality is directly for the clients of the agencies and providers. Unfortunately, until now Supported Employment agencies and Career Counselling providers do not and can´t use virtual reality for their clients or they use it to a very limited extent, in our case this is valid for the UK partner. They don´t have qualified staff, plus there is a lack of user-friendly and accessible technologies and they don´t have the technological equipment to implement virtual reality in their daily practice. Through this project, these needs are be addressed. There is a consortium of partners who support each other in implementing virtual reality and more importantly, they will be trained in using virtual reality and will have the technical aspect of using virtual reality in their practice solved. The project focuses on exchange and gaining experience with using virtual reality among Supported Employment agencies and providers of Career Counselling for disadvantaged people. In the project, there are 16 Supported Employment Counsellors and Career Counsellors from the Czech Republic, the UK, Romania, and Poland educated in using virtual reality in their Supported Employment and counselling practice. They will be able to create and adjust virtual reality scenarios. They will know how to use these scenarios for the training of their clients´ hard skills and soft skills. A ""recommendations package about using virtual reality"" for the community of Supported Employment Counsellors and Career Counsellors for disadvantaged people will be prepared. This package should serve future counsellors as a source of specialized information and will make them more ready to implement virtual reality into their practice. This package should illustrate concrete, real examples of the implementation of new technologies into their practice. The project enhances the use of new technologies in the social area where the staff is not as used to the new technologies as in, for example, the commercial area. The staff of these organizations and their clients will be better equipped for dealing with a nowadays ever-changing society.The mentioned needs of Supported Employment agencies and Career Counselling providers were further enhanced by the pandemic situation. The pandemic showed that it is necessary to take the e-path in the area of social and other helping services much more than now. The pandemic accelerated what was already present in the development trends of moving into the digital technology world. Thus the project contributes to the quality of social services and keeping up with these trends.The project helps Supported Employment agencies and Career Counselling providers and their clients to keep up with the ever-rising demands of employers and the rapid technological progress in all areas of life. The project further develops and reinforces the network of organizations using virtual reality.<< Implementation >>We plan to realize 4 training sessions for a group of 16 Supported Employment and Career Counselling counsellors from the Czech Republic, the UK, Romania, and Poland. They are expected to posishare their knowledge and ideas about how to implement virtual reality in the practice of supported employment and career counselling and determine the best way of implementation of virtual reality in their practice. They will learn how to use the VIAR360 program for creating virtual reality scenarios to train their clients skills. The trainer will teach them how to use the proper technologic equipment. Then between the third and the fourth training session, they will create their own virtual reality scenarios for their concrete clients. They will be writing a structured report about the whole experience on two of them. One will be for hard skills and one for soft skills development. They will test how virtual reality works in the whole process of supported employment and career counselling on their concrete clients or groups of clients. This will be also included in the reports. The experience learning is promoted here. Throughout the whole learning process and implementation process, they will have support from the trainer, two result coordinators, and national coordinators and they will support each other.<< Results >>We plan to have two results that will complement each other.An Educational Methodological Framework for Implementation of Virtual Reality in Supported Employment and Career Counselling and a Collection of Best Practice reports.The methodological framework shall contain guidelines, recommendations for the implementation process, answering questions like how to determine if virtual reality training can be effective for a client, how to communicate about it with the client and his surroundings, how to create virtual reality scenarios, and how to use them with the client or groups of clients, how to evaluate the progress and how to put it together with other procedures in the process of supported employment and career counselling. This will be complemented with a collection of real-life experiences of real counsellors using 2 types of scenarios - one for hard skills development, the second for soft skills development. It will include their feelings and thoughts on the learning of creating the scenarios and the process with their clients.The project will generate a group of participants who undergo the education related to creating the scenarios for their job and with a rather new experience, so they will be able to use their new skills in the jobs. And they could be a support for other organizations in their countries who would be interested in using virtual reality. There will be an international network of professionals who could support each other in using virtual reality in their practice. The partner organizations from the Czech Republic, the UK, Romania, and Poland will be equipped with new necessary technologies for using virtual reality. The skills of Supported Employment Counsellors and Career Counsellors in the field of new technologies will be strengthened. The secondary target group – the clients of the partners´ organizations will have a much better chance to develop their skills and thus more opportunities in the labor market. And they will get acquainted with new technologies as well. Another secondary target group - employers of people with disabilities will have a better chance to employ them without suffering financial burden from employing a person with a disability due to increased needs for their training period and increased inclination to make mistakes."