Volunteering is an important way for people to develop themselves, by building new relationships and gaining a whole set of life skills that can improve their employability. It serves to gather important experience in unknown fields, to develop social, personal and organisational competences.

However, the competences acquired in volunteering are rarely assessed and validated, hence, they are “lost” in the CV of the volunteers, even though employers state how important they are when it comes to selecting a new employee. Also, there is a lack of feasible and easy-to-use instruments for validating informal learning in volunteering.

Job Bridge aims to fill this gap by developing a fully-fledged user-centred approach for validating non-formal and informal learning processes in volunteering activities, including a well proven web-based documentation, both for learners and those supervising them, the “facilitators”. Furthermore, Job Bridge aims at bridging informal, non-formal and formal learning by integrating social, personal and organisational competences in a system which can be linked to existing validation and certification instruments such as EQF, ECVET, ECTS and/or EUROPASS.

It will thus contribute to an increased transparency, and recognition of skills and qualifications, to facilitate learning and employability.

The project is directly linked to the 2012 Council Recommendation on validation of non-formal and informal learning as it intends to propose a concrete tool for documenting such learning outcomes.