We are happy to announce the three winners of our Job Bridge Award – the Job Bridge Award addressed projects and initiatives aimed at validating learning outcomes in volunteering.

The winners are:

• Validation of Volunteer Work, presented by ESN, Belgium
• Skills Summary  – The easy way to track and develop your life skills, presented by National Youth Council of Ireland
• NOW App, presented by NOW, Switzerland

Find here the project abstracts:

• Validation of Volunteer Work, ESN: The main aim of the project is to develop a tool based on collected data to better understand and measure the development of our volunteers to be able to validate their competences. The process started with researching and reviewing prior research, tools and documents done in and outside the organisation.
  Based on research, ESN developed a competency framework that defines knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for volunteers within an organisation. Individual roles inside the organisation will have its own set of competencies identified for them to perform the job effectively. We have also developed a competence inventory for the organisation, where there are 85 competences connected to the work done in the organisation, and for each of them, we have defined skills, knowledge and attitude.
  In the next year, the plan is to extend the HR map, identify and develop more competences, create competence clusters, identify competence levels and create performance indicators for each of them and map the competences per field and create field-specific competency frameworks. Finally, the aim is to develop the validation tool in the digital form in order to optimise the use of it, make it accessible to all 15,000 volunteers in our organisation, as well as sustainable.
• Skills Summary – The easy way to track and develop your life skills, National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI): The skills people gain through volunteering are skills for life. Skills Summary is an innovative way for young people to explore these skills and identify areas that need development.
  Skills Summary is a free and easy to use online tool that captures and measures the transferrable life skills young people gain by participating in non-formal education, such as volunteering and youth work. It builds confidence in young people, so that they can better communicate the value of these essential skills, both to themselves and future employers. Furthermore, it raises awareness of the importance of volunteering and youth work for personal skills development and the impact on our society.
  Skills Summary is a dynamic way to track, develop, capture and evaluate core, transferable life skills. More than just a measurement tool, Skills Summary supports the sustained development of young people’s learning outside of formal education. It introduces a language to young people which helps them to recognise and validate the skills they already have, while also inviting them to set goals, increase their skill levels and pursue new skills. This new awareness of core skills, combined with their resulting new confidence, is an asset to young people pursuing employment and other opportunities.
  With Skills Summary users can:
• NOW App, Switzerland:With the NOW App we have developed a solution to accompany and measure the development of 21st Century Competences acquired in volunteer experiences or non-formal education. The NOW App allows organizations to map the competences developed in the learning opportunities they offer and to track each individual’s development. The NOW App allows each organization to personalize the solution and select the competences that are most relevant to them.
  For learners, the app allows to gain insight into their strength through self-, peer- and facilitator assessment and to boost their competences with microlearnings. With the e-certificate generated at the end of the learning experience, learners will have a simple tool to showcase their competences and link them back to the real-life experiences that allowed for their development. For the facilitator or volunteer coordinators the app helps to personalize the learning process through the facilitator dashbaord and offers a simple way to monitor and measure the development of each individual.