Earlier in the year we received the welcome news that our application to the Erasmus+ UK National Agency for our new project 'Competency and Learning Development for Job Brokers in the EU' had been approved.
Job Broker is a three-year Erasmus+ Key Action 2 Strategic Partnership. It is led by Rinova, and the partnership involves a group of organisations from Spain, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Austria, Greece and Cyprus as well as the UK. The participating organisations are drawn from a variety of contexts - public employment services, vocational training agencies, professional development bodies - that are all involved with the development or provision of services to support unemployed people in the labour market.
Job Broker has now gone 'live' and was fully launched in Rome over two productive days on the 16th and 17th November, at the headquarters of the Italian partner E.RI.FO - Ente per la Ricerca e Formazione.
Pictured: The Job Broker partnership working together on the morning of its first meeting in Rome.
Job Broker represents the second phase of an initiative first instigated by Rinova and its EU partners under the Leonardo da Vinci Partnerships strand between 2013 and 2015. The earlier project enabled partners to define and explore common characteristics with the job brokering role that is becoming more common in different contexts in the EU as public employment services and vocational training organisations develop new ways to tackle unemployment amongst different target groups and 'broker' new jobs by working between those that are unemployed, the training and provision that has been designed to support them, and employers.
The Eramsus+ project will substantially build upon this earlier preparatory work over the next three years. It will undertake a comprehensive programme of research and needs analysis, and develop an occupational profile and design and test a new professional training curriculum with job brokers in the partner countries. The project will also explore professional certification to assist with the european mobility of qualified job brokers to assist with increasing the mobility of european job seekers.
Information and news about the new project will be featured in due course at the Job Broker website, which will be relaunched in 2016 for the new project, as will the Facebook pages that have been set up - and through periodic-e-zines that will be produced and distributed via partner mailing lists as well as at information events in each country. If you would like to be added to the mailing list for the e-zines, contact us at info@rinova.co.uk