"<< Background >>After 3 years of collaborative work around a first Erasmus+ project on Soft Skills entitled ""Soft skills"", it is by mutual agreement that the Régie des Écrivains and 6 of its Austrian, Spanish, French, Belgian and Slovenian partners have decided to deepen the work done and to apply for this second Eramsus + project. After having developed a Soft Skills list, a classroom training program and a placement and assessment protocol linked to this training, the partners now want to focus on on-the-job training and recruitment and management processes within companies and propose transferable tools to include Soft Skills in the culture of European companies. As we know, Soft Skills are a combination of social and relational skills, communications, personality traitś and attitudes that complement technical skills. Today, these Soft Skills are highly sought after by recruiters (between 70 and 89% depending on the European country) and research shows that 85% of professional success comes from social and relational skills developed over the years. HR personnel and companies no longer consider Soft Skills as a fad and want to implement dedicated training and integrate these skills in their recruitment and management processes. As the naturalist Charles Darwin said, ""It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that best adapts to change"". Soft skills are precisely the best way to adapt to change and their recognition and valorisation offer many opportunities: whatever the professional qualification, whatever the job, the usefulness of soft skills is universal and transferable; soft skills will add a winning asset to your application and it is their identification that will make the difference on the job market or within a company. Assessing and valuing soft skills and their progress in a work situation in the form of a ""badge"" or micro accreditation by working on observable behaviors is becoming essential to support professional development and recruitment. Offering on-the-job training and giving keys to trainers/tutors/recruiters and HR personnel to integrate Soft Skills into their work habits therefore seems to be complementary and necessary.In addition to the existing classroom training, we would like to offer a Workplace Training Program (WTP) related to the 20 soft skills identified in our first project and transferable to any company. We see this training as a real added value that responds to a need that is increasingly present in Europe; all the more so as FEST is considered as the ""best soft skills development device"" according to the 2020 Soft Skills Barometer.Offering tools to HR staff and recruiters to integrate soft skills in their management and recruitment processes seems to be a key element in the implementation of a soft skills corporate culture. The European partners wish to offer a more complete range of Soft Skills services to companies to meet their new recruitment and management challenges, but also their training needs. In short, you will have understood, the Soft Skills 2.0 partners want to collaborate to set up a Soft Skills corporate culture in Europe and to give all the keys so that companies appropriate them.<< Objectives >>Partners of Soft Skills 2.0 project wish to facilitate the implementation of Soft Skills in the work environment for people with low level of qualification or in situation of handicap and to allow companies to identify and train to Soft Skills.The challenge of the training organizations partners of the Soft Skills 2.0 project is to accompany the development of the visibility of Soft Skills through the placement in companies, the job search as well as the implementation of Soft Skills in the work environment. At the same time, these organizations also want to offer new services thanks to the development of new tools for on-the-job training to support companies in their implementation (tutor training, pedagogical tools, evaluation, recognition). The challenge for the social and solidarity economy companies in the project is to develop recruitment tools for people with low levels of qualification or with disabilities. But also to propose a development of soft skills through training actions in work situation, professional interviews based on technical and behavioral skills. For companies, to whom we will disseminate our work, we will propose new recruitment practices integrating Soft Skills so that they can project themselves on a candidate and open up/expand the recruitment criteria. We will also propose new tools to accompany on-the-job training. We will accompany the practical implementation of Soft Skills training in the workplace, both with tutors and staff. We will identify the skills through a positioning protocol and validate those acquired through an evaluation. The expected results for people with a low level of qualification or in a situation of handicap, is to learn to know their Soft Skills and to know how to put them forward, it is to have a head start for recruitment interviews, it is to participate actively in one's professional evolution.<< Implementation >>How can Soft Skills be valued in the search for an internship, during a job interview, during the writing of a CV, during a professional evaluation interview, during a continuing education? The main stake of the partners remains for this project the employability of people with low level of qualification but also the implementation of a continuous pathway, a pathway to success. Therefore, using the same glossary and the same practices as in the first project is essential to ensure continuity between what we have done in the first three years and what we will do in the next two years. To do this, our Soft skills 2.0 project will be structured around 5 phases: - A first phase entitled ""Articulation TrainingInWorkSituation/Soft skills"" which will focus on the principles and modalities of FEST in Europe and will try to create a Soft skills path in a company that can be accompanied and evaluated (recruitment, management, training in work situation). This phase will allow us to produce a guide of soft skills in a company culture. - A second phase entitled ""Soft Skills Toolbox"" should allow the implementation of management and recruitment tools integrating soft skills and to work on the levels of requirements related to the corporate culture to promote transferability. The result will be a soft skills toolbox for recruitment and management in companies- A third phase entitled ""pedagogical itinerary"" will focus on the implementation of a soft skills training program in a work situation and on the creation of tools related to this training program. The result will be a formalized program and tools. - A fourth phase entitled ""Experimentation"" which will help us create training modules and pedagogical tools so that HR personnel and trainers/recruiters can appropriate the above-mentioned productions. We will therefore have 2 formalized training programs and will be able to experiment these trainings in the framework of two mobilities: one in Spain for HR staff and one in Belgium for tutors/trainers. - A fifth phase entitled ""Evaluation and valorisation of soft skills"" will aim to build tools for positioning and evaluating soft skills in a work situation while building tools to measure the impact of the project. Here again, tools for positioning, evaluation and valorisation are expected, as well as indicators and questionnaires to help us measure the impact of the project. At the same time, we will strive to develop the digital platform Zerobarrier that we used in the first project and that will allow us to simplify the use of certain tools. We will also regularly update our web page www.softskills-project.eu to ensure access to all the productions made during the project.<< Results >>The expected effects and results of our project will be felt at various levels: - At the level of the organizations with whom we will work or to whom we will disseminate the project, which will become imbued with a new corporate culture with recruitment, management and training tools that integrate Soft Skills and which will see a real added value. - At the level of the individuals for whom the taking into account of Soft Skills will have incidences: as well for the HR personnel and the tutors trainers on whom an impact will be felt on their methods of trainings, recruitment but also of management; as for the learners for whom a direct impact on the employability will be felt (thanks to the recognition of their Soft skills and to trainings in work situation accessible to all) - At the level of work methods, which will integrate soft skills that can change the scales of values and judgments of everyone and thus directly impact our work methods. These effects and results will be felt at the local, regional, national and international levels. At the local level, we are counting on professional integration, job retention and faster career progression for people with low qualifications and/or disabilities, but also on an improvement in the recruitment mechanism and management methods of the companies that will use our tools. All the partners also hope for an increase in services thanks to a new offer of on-the-job training. Finally, we already imagine a development of the Soft Skills 2.0 device in various sectors of activity. On a regional and national scale, we will be able to propose a new offer of services for human resources personnel, from recruitment to management methods and mobilizing soft skills tools, a new training in soft skills in a work situation for employees of companies and learners of training organizations and also and above all to reach an awareness of the interest of integrating soft skills in a corporate culture. On a European scale, we are banking on sharing expertise resources around our working groups, an exchange between the European co-pilots of different phases for a practical implementation of the project but above all a recognition of the Soft skills 2.0 training program in a work situation for people with low level of qualification and/or in a handicap situation and of the agile tools which are linked to it."

"The Erasmus+ Soft skills project is part of an approach that facilitates access to soft skills for people with low levels of qualification in order to accelerate their professional integration. Indeed, mastering a professional activity does not only suppose the implementation of technical skills specific to the job (hard skills), it also relies on the mobilization of soft skills. To this end, the partnership has developed a method as well as pedagogical tools for the training and the evaluation of soft skills. The European Commission works with EU countries to strengthen the common framework of key competences, in other words knowledges, skills and behaviours that will help the learners in their personal fulfilment and, later, in their job search and participation in civil society. These key competences consist of ‘traditional’ and ‘horizontal’ skills. At a time when the world of work is changing profoundly and the global economy is not creating a sufficient number of jobs, there is a growing emphasis on those ‘horizontal’ skills. Indeed, employers want their new employees to have both good interpersonal and technical skills. Those “soft” skills are human skills, personality traits and know-how-to-be. In this context, the development of ""soft skills"" is particularly important to enable people with low qualifications or disabilities to meet future challenges. In its current form, vocational training, based on a formal organization, does not meet the expectations of people with low levels of qualification who often do not have access to formal training. It is therefore essential to develop a new vision of training and to add the acquisition of ""soft skills"". This is the goal we had when developing this Erasmus + Soft skills project. Our main objectives were the followed one- to associate soft skills and appropriate pedagogical approaches of alternative education and personal development, - to create pedagogical tools for technical supervisors and people with low qualifications or in a handicap situation - work on soft skills evaluation methods9 European partners active in the field of vocational training and coming from France, Belgium, Spain, Austria and Slovenia wanted to respond to these objectives and together they co-constructed innovative solutions to make soft skills accessible to people with a low level of qualification and/or in a situation of disability. For example, the following were created- The European catalog of soft skills references which gives an overview of the soft skills approach followed by the project: it contains the list of soft skills defined within the framework of the project, the levels of acquisition and their definitions as well as a description of the process of acquisition of soft skills and of the positioning and evaluation which are linked to it- The training kit enables the preparation and implementation of soft skills training in any organization and with any learner. It describes the training method and program in detail and provides training summary sheets by level. It also provides suggestions on the pedagogical tools to use at each stage of the training or the posture to adopt as a trainer. - The Soft skills pedagogical toolbox presents a collection of more than 80 tools that can be used to train in soft skills. The tools are based on the experience of the project partners. The training kit suggests their use.- The soft skills positioning and evaluation protocol provides all the keys to evaluate and certify the acquisition of soft skills. It describes the different moments and methods of training and gives tools to evaluate correctly; All our tools have been tested with our target audiences, i.e. trainers and people who are far from employment or in a handicap situation. Thus, a first virtual mobility allowed us to train in English 14 trainers coming from the respective structures of each partner in the use of the Soft skills tools. The 14 trainers indicated that they wanted to integrate the Soft skills tools in their daily work. In a second step, these same trainers were able to test the training in their respective structures. Thus, 98 people who are far from employment or in a handicap situation were able to follow at least one soft skills training. 70 of them could be evaluated and 62 validated the level of soft skills they were trained to. Our tools have been made available to everyone free of charge on our digital educational platform www.softskills-project.eu and have been disseminated on our social networks, our web pages and during our dissemination events."

European rural areas will boost when their natural resources constitute the basis of innovative and sustainable value chains with a high positive economic impact. In this sense, forests constitute an asset that provide not only ecosystems and biodiversity, but also a valuable and sustainable raw material, “wood”. Wood is consumed by various sectors, including one of the most “raw materials” demanding sector, the construction. The BASAJAUN project is a puzzle composed of 1st and 2nd transformation companies, research organizations, associations and public bodies that are focused on maximizing the forest value through its use in wood construction. Its main goal is to optimize the wood forest resources to enable the construction of a medium sized building (16 dwellings with 4 floors) with the lowest possible forest hectares – that will depend on the tree species and the forest local peculiarities (climate, surface, ...). The whole process will be optimised to maximize the consumption of wood products from the forest (solid wood, fibers, veneers, bark, sawdust, etc.). For this purpose, a) innovative wood-based construction materials (thermal insulation, composites, varnishes, SIPs) and systems (structure, facades, floors, walls, roof and fixings) will be developed and upscaled, b) one full-scale demo building (France) will be constructed and one experimental building (Spain) that use all developed products, c) digitalization of the whole construction value chain (from forest to building) will be done and d) the rural development impact will be studied at regional level. The environmental impact of the products of these value chains will be assessed as well. Besides, to assure a sustainable impact of the project a novel thematic platform to integrate the stakeholders of the wood region with urban areas will be developed. Besides, BASAJAUN leverages the previous results of successful projects where the innovative materials and systems were designed at laboratory and semi-industrial scale.