Fønix AS in Norway has been the coordinator of an Erasmus+ KA2 project: Basic Skills in Working Life. The project has involved partnership from Norway (Fønix AS), UK (The Manchester Colle), Portugal (CITEVE), Slovenia (STEP Institute), Austria (BEST) and Italy (CONFAPI). This has been a good working partnership since it represented both adult learning organizations with a good working relationship to basic skills in working life (Fønix, The Manchester College and STEP Institute), and representatives from different business branches with a good working network to relevant companies (CONFAPI and CITEVE).The project included 5 Intellectual outputs, 1 Teacher Training Event in Porto; Portugal and 1 Multiplier Event in form of a two seminars in Rome, Italy A summary of the project results are as following:•A qualitative report regarding what the future may look like for the low skilled and low educated workers in the perspective of formal vocational education end certification in each of the partner countries.•An identification of critical factors/success criteria to succeed with basic vocational education/training and certification in different types of branches/companies in each partner country. •Practical training/pilots in some dedicated companies/branches in three of the partner countries – Italy, Slovenia and Portugal.•A lot of good examples from «lessons learned» from the pilot projects together with the practical outcome from the multiplier event with the teachers/trainers and the evaluatorsOne of the main outcomes of the project consisted of a large number of quantitative and qualitative data collected from eight different branches in six countries. All results and reports are thoroughly documented on the project's website: http://www.basicskillsinworkinglife.no/In the Basic Skills in Working Life project, we specially targeted for companies / branches where the demand for new skills was generated due to technological changes and / or new digitalized production methods. From the data collected, we observed that across all countries and branches the need of soft skills was more valued than the need of technical skills. By soft skills, we defined the “character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person's relationships with other people, they are to do with who people are, rather than what they know. Therefore, they encompass the character traits that decide how well one interacts with others. In workplace they are considered a complement to hard skills”. The major findings from the project can be summarized as the following:•There is a recognized demand for more basic soft skills in companies.•The three most recognized demands can be summarized as:The ability to adapt to change at workThe ability to maintain trustful relationship with customers / colleaguesThe ability to work autonomouslyThe main target group in our project was teacher / trainers that was working with employees with low basic skills in working life. This was a main target group from the beginning of the project and did not change during the project period.The project was successful by reaching a significant number of teachers / trainers, especially in Norway, UK and Portugal. In addition to this we also reached a number of leaders / representatives from companies from different branches in each of the partner countries.We also reached a large number of leaders / representatives form international and Italian companies during the two end seminars in Rome, Italy.The results from the Basic Skills in Working Life project is taken further in a new Erasmus+ KA2 project that was granted in the 2019 round. In this new project MOOCs IN BASIC SKILLS TRAINING we plan to take the findings to a higher level and take into account for further discussion and development the following issues: 1. Soft skills are more needed than occupational skills in the “new” industry. The question is how these will enhance low skilled employees, and how we can prepare a curriculum for better training for the target group. 2. If common training framework for low skilled employees is to be put in place; how to accommodate all partners’ needs?To answer these questions we will conduct a project with the same partnership that produce curriculums for practical training courses on the most important social skills in working life, supporting digital learning maps and combined and incorporated with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

"By the time of the project application, the issue of immigration and the integration of immigrants were high on the policy agenda of EU and OECD countries, both from an economic and a social point of view. Active participation of immigrants in the labour market and, more generally, in public life was (and still is) vital for ensuring social cohesion in the host country and the ability of migrants to function as autonomous, productive and successful citizens. It is also critical for facilitating their acceptance by the host-country population. The reason for an exchange of Good Practices through PLAs was the fact that some European economies and societies are far more successful than others in integrating immigrants into their labour markets and better in offering opportunities to young immigrants to unfold their talents and obtain qualifications. The main objective was to share good practices, to learn from each other and to take over successful approaches, there where possible. For that reason the MBO Raad, as initiator of the project, tried to build a mixed partnership of policymakers on one hand and providers (schools) on the other. This succeeded in all partner countries, although the providers side was generally stronger represented.It is also important to say that the flow of refugees has drastically decreased in the period between the birth of the project idea (mid 2016) and now, which made the project however not less important, as the groups are still there, but the huge sense of urgency was not the same as before and the number of newcomers was for all partners smaller than they expected at the start of the project. The partners realized however that such flows of newcomers can be repeated in the future, which made the focus on the transferability of the lessons learnt for future situations still very important.According to the initial project plan, we had six (6) transnational meetings held in The Netherlands, Finland, Germany, UK. Sweden and Denmark.The partners prepared their own meetings (PLA's), including a presentation of their institution, the work they are doing, their national or regional system and a selected number of Good Practices (interventions) regarding the integration of newcomers. After all these meetings, partners reflected on the value for them of the demonstrated GP's by using astandard reflection form about the possible application of the GP in their own daily practice. In this reflection it was also asked to explain how these good practices could be applied in the own situation and if not useful, why not. Next to this, partners reported about their dissemination and valorisation activities and used a standard form for this, which was called the ""Capturing and measuring reach of the project."" Finally all transnational meetings were evaluated by the AoC from the UK.It needs to be said that all partners were rather satisfied with the composition of the partnership and the variety of Good Practices, as there was a large diversity of partners ranging from a rather small scale approach in Finland with relatively small groups of immigrants to the large scale integration policy in NL and UK, where a lot of the planning tends to be on a national level. This made that situations were not always comparable and that some of the GP's might not be transferable, but it was nevertheless inspiring to see how partners are working on the same challenges, but with other legislations and on another scale.It was very informative to see how different political choices work out in the practice and to see the pro's and contra's of such choices. This was rather clear in the case of the rather strict (in the eyes of some partners: harsh) policy of Denmark (Randers). Newcomers were offered opportunities, but only if they participated in a full program of learning language and culture, whilst also working in companies. Staying away had immediately consequences for their income.There has been one important change in the project and as a result of that also regarding the distribution of tasks, which was the cancelling of the second LTTA in Sweden. This was done in consultancy with the national NA, as we had made a mistake in the application by calculating only the travelling costs to the LTTA venues, but not the subsistence costs. In order to make it financial feasible, we decided in close consultation with the NA to have one LTTA instead of two. The change in the distribution of tasks was that The Swedish partner had not to organise a LTTA. In spite of having only one LTTA instead of two, we certainly reached our objectives. But it goes almost without saying that two LTTA's should have had a wider impact than one, simply because we should have reached more people."