ESSENCE project on the finish line: going public for larger impact.

ESSENCE project from the very beginning has been a unique attempt to develop a tailored platform and toolkit for development of the soft skills to boost the employability. Now the project is entering the finish sprint when all the activities have to finalized to ensure the expected impact from the project. All the material that was planned is developed and publicly available in all 7 project languages. In addition to the availability the project team made an effort to make the teaching material attractive and user friendly. The course material and tools have been complemented with appealing animations that are now placed on the project webpage as well as available on Youtube. 

In addition to the attractive and appealing components of the project also serious content has been developed. This includes the validation report (guidelines for uptake and implementation) as well as soft skills development manifesto. Both documents are developed to represent lessons learned in terms of content as well as experiences during the development of the different components of the project. Work on this material has been conducted on a cross country level thus maximizing the appropriateness for each and every country participating in the project. Explicit and implicit learning lessons from the project team has been taken into account to provide maximized feasibility for various contexts that can be present in EU member countries. 

Considering the importance and actuality of the project it is crucial to ensure both short term and log term impact. The short-term impact to large extent is already operational through the toolkit and other material. In order to ensure a broader spread of the achieved results all partners are preparing special multiplier events to take place during the October 2022. Those events are aimed to promote the outcomes from the project to various groups of stakeholders: companies, educational institutions, students and other target groups etc. In addition, it will be important to collect the feedback about different components of the project. The feedback part can be considered as an important precondition for ensuring the long-term impact. It is expected that ESSENCE project will have a number of spinoffs that will take soft skills development to the new levels. The collected feedback will be used to further tailor the various tools increase their usability and increase the efficiency of learning. Even if any type of spin-off is welcome and beneficial the leading role here should be taken by the existing partnership for ESSENCE project.  The good news here is that there are already some ideas and plans how the idea can be developed. So stay tuned and connected with ESSENCE for follow up.