Welcome Words

Soft skills are often explained by means of terms linked with some personality traits, such as optimism, common sense, responsibility, sense of humor, integrity, and with some practicable competences such as: empathy, work in team, leadership, communication, friendly manners, negotiation, sociability, creativity (flexible thought) and problem-solving.
Youth mobility programs, especially in the field of non-formal education, play a first-rank part in the process of developing the non-technical, “soft” competences of the young people. By participating in and committing themselves to the long-term activities of some youth/volunteering organizations, particularly in the non-formal activities of these, young people can certainly ensure that their soft skills will be considerably enhanced.
Thus, given the importance of developing young people’s soft skills in view of a successful personal and professional career as well as the value of non-formal education for developing and qualifying “soft skills” of the young people, it is necessary to move to action many agents of non-formal education for young people, so that they can help young people to work on and express the evolution of their soft skills through launching and carrying out quality programs/projects as well as using tools and methods convenient for watching and evaluating the progress of every young beneficiary as regards their soft skills. Also, youth workers in non-formal education need to help young participants to evaluate themselves to the progress in developing their own soft skills.
In this context, we organized an 11 day long training course and invited to Lefkas, Greece 37 youth leaders and youth workers active in the field of non-formal education, coming from 19 youth organizations, from 14 different countries of E.U., eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
During this training course, we exchange views and applied methods about following and assessing soft skills acquired by the young participants in our activities, we also developed new competences and skills and became effective in choosing evaluating methods and tools convenient for our activities and tailored to the “profiles” of the youth and to the socio-cultural and economic background they stem from, in the frame of non-formal education.
During this training course, we also created THIS innovative pedagogical tool which facilitates the development of activities which support soft skill acquisition and which support the monitoring, the follow up and the evaluation of soft skills among the young beneficiaries of non-formal activities mainly the beneficiaries of “youth mobility programs” and the “Erasmus+” program. We did this by being inspired from the practical experience and research of our partners, from previous publications and initiatives effectuated in this field. This tool is being diffused on a large scale in order to aggrandize the number of young people benefiting from this initiative.