From May 6 to 12, 2019, our worker Elisa had the opportunity to participate in the second phase of the international Training Course "YOCOMO", hosted in Germany, near Cologne, and led by trainers Salvi Greco (Italy), Snezana Knoch (Serbia), Monika Kėžaitė-Jakniūnienė (Lithuania) and Gisèle Evrard Markovic (France).
The course aimed to deepen theETS model of competencies, which contains a detailed list of behaviors, knowledge, attitudes and values that youth workers must possess in order to work in international contexts. The model was developed by the SALTO Research Center, and is currently the most widespread reference point in Europe for the recognition of youth worker competencies.
One of the major challenges in our professional development is to change our attitudes: not very tangible and difficult to measure, but crucial for those who work with young people. They are manifested in our behaviors and influence our work, relationships and social context.
YOCOMO primarily aimed to provide participating youth workers with a space to reflect, share experiences and better understand how our attitudes work. The aim was to develop awareness of participants’ strengths and limitations, as well as to define what skills would be useful to develop in the future.
The experience has been very positive for Elisa since the preparatory phase and in particular from the online course that preceded the course in Germany, which allowed her to have a more precise vision of the parts that make up the ETS model of competences.
During the course we insisted a lot on the importance of moments of reflection and evaluation that should always accompany the activities with the young people, both to collect feedback and to reconstruct the learning path, and to identify which personal/professional and project objectives have been achieved by the youth worker.
The other participants, from Spain, Germany, Latvia, Greece and Great Britain, have been a great source of inspiration for Elisa, so much so that we are already collaborating on new projects, networks and activities together...we’ll keep you updated!
