Objective
The Direction Employment programme aims to contribute to reducing youth unemployment, as well as integrating young people from vulnerable groups into the labor market, who can build a career in one of the most competitive and rapidly growing industries, namely IT.
Problem
The initiative is in response to the alarming statistics of Eurostat for 2018. According to it, 15 million young people between the ages of 20 and 34 from the 28 EU member states are unemployed, not in education or training. In Italy and Greece, the countries with the highest levels of youth unemployment, more than a quarter of young people are outside the labor market.
Activities
The initiative proposed an innovative training program in Information Technology /IT/ for young people aged between 17 and 29 from the city of Sofia. Some of them are from various vulnerable groups – Roma, refugees, LGBTI people, young people growing up in extreme poverty or dropping out of school. The partners are non-governmental organizations that will work with these groups, and experts from the partners from Ireland will be responsible for the quality implementation of the project.
Who is behind the initiative
Direction Employment programme was developed by the Bulgarian Workshop for Civic Initiatives Foundation, together with partners from Ireland (DMC Metrix), Lithuania (National Association for the Rights of the LGBT (LGBT) Community – LGL), Slovenia (Ljudska univerza Velenje), Italy (Lai-momo) and Portugal (P.PORTO).
The program is implemented with the financial support provided by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway within the framework of the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment.
Results
The program supported the development of young people who are unemployed, not in education and are from marginalized groups.
The project trained 258 unemployed young people in three key professional areas: programming, digital marketing and software testing. These areas were strategically chosen as they offer significant career development opportunities and are in high demand on the labor market.
In addition to the training, we organized a series of meetings with business representatives to facilitate the access of course graduates to jobs. These meetings provided young people with the opportunity to meet potential employers and build valuable professional contacts. As a result, within 3 months of the end of the training, about 20% of those who successfully completed the courses started working.
Learn more on the Initiative’s website: https://directionemployment.org
