Professional development activity in Ohrid

Last week the Professional development activity took place in Ohrid, The repubic of North Macedonia. At the activity were 20 participants from Serbia, The republic of North Macedonia, Italy and Bulgaria.

Our needs as youth workers for gaining knowledge and experience come from the need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset of young people in our regions. By participating in this project, we gained knowledge and skills to help young people to develop their entrepreneurial mindset, such as understanding the importance of risk-taking, developing skills creative problem solving and understanding the importance of networking. We have the opportunity to provide mentoring and guidance to young people to help them develop their entrepreneurial skills.

Part of the training dedicated to career guidance and counselling has enabled youth workers to apply new strategies in preparing young people for the labour market. Through the exchange of experience we built the creation of examples of good practice and the transfer of knowledge to every participant. Dissemination activities were planned for each participating country and the application of what was learned through workshops with young people. By connecting knowledge from the field of entrepreneurship and career management skills, youth workers are able to provide more expedient support to young people.

In the field of entrepreneurship we recognized that many young people want to start their job, because they do not want to work in companies in standard positions, but to try their hand at freelancing, management, etc. Also that social entrepreneurship is increasingly represented among NGOs and youth associations.

We wanted to get closer to the topics, the ways in which we can help young people in these topics, provide them with as much information as possible, as well as tools that will help them in researching a business idea, market research, writing a business plan, solving problems. We believe that this is knowledge that can be very useful to them at this time and we have exchanged experiences and good practices in that area.

The third part of the training were activities on building soft skills and creating a set of necessary competencies for youth workers. Sessions of social skills are prepared by all partner organizations.

All of the above will have a synergistic effect and will provide youth workers with the opportunity to improve by exchanging experience and ideas their work through new knowledge, methods and tools, and therefore transfer knowledge to the young people they work with in their organizations.

The Professional development activity is part of project “An entrepreneurial mindset for young people”, which is co-founded by the European Union trough Erasmus+ programme. And realised in partnership with associations ASK – Skopje, Walk together association Bulgaria and Eurosud Italy.