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„Youth & Job Browser” training course, Sabac, Serbia

 

“While in Sabac, we had a really great time at the hostel “Art of life” that Ivan, the host, owns. The first impression of it was amazing and very grateful. We were being waited by his wife and his small boy, Gregori, both of them wonderful people. And of course the dogs Cupka and Klempa, the Legend. The house is huge, full of art pieces, pictures, crystals, precious stones, the walls are painted, wrote upon, even drawn on, showing meaningful messages and symbols. There are many big windows who offer such a nice view over the city and the sunset in the evening. We had the luck to have a piano synthesizer there as well, and be a part of a group with many musicians, so every day we had the pleasure to listen to music, very good music. And sometimes we didn’t really have that pleasure because not everyone was so good at playing them.

The project lasted for 10 days. The activities revolved around getting used to the idea of soft-skills, their importance in today’s job finding process, their impact and dynamic upon our personality and how that affects our success in finding a job and our job performance as well as climbing the hierarchical ladder in that particular domain. Not everything depends on our hard-skills alone. Communication, emotional intelligence, compassion or social skills are equally important whenever and wherever we are working with people. The very first contact with a job is normally through an interview. Here these soft-skills have a crucial role because you need to know how to present yourself, how to “sell” your abilities, your skills. The CV is not enough for an HR recruiter. The face-to-face interaction gives additional information about the person. We have discussed and learnt more about that. As well as some interesting situations and experiences each participant had in their own country regarding the job finding process and more other aspects that we began going into starting from this.

We also had to create multimedia content using our own videos, photos, sounds and any other materials that we had the opportunity to take while discovering the culture of the city of Sabac. The river, the parks, the graffiti walls, the traditional music, the war stories, the ruins and more. We were guided to use a very simple video editing tool for smart phone: Kinemaster. Very useful and easy to use. We had much fun using it. We used our imagination and creativity and everyone had their unique product which was very interesting to watch. I felt that I was discovering the other participants through their multimedia work, which was very interesting. Except from the Portugal participants, we were all Balkan countries, so there were many common points we were related to. But even so, we still had so much in common with the participants from the Iberian Peninsula area.

We also used the situational theater method where we put ourselves in different life and job situations where some of us had to act as themselves and after those self asses and analyze the effects of the choices and behaviors we did in the given context. After that, we had to create our own situations, characters and problems then put them in act. Most of the activities where group based, focusing on multinational groups.

The project itself consists in 4 parts, this being the first one. We are looking forward for the next 3 as the ones who are implementing these projects are very nice and interesting people to work and be with.”

Madalina, Maria and Claudiu, participants