In the first week of October, participants came from across 7 countries in the Vienna’s unique atmosphere of baroque streetscapes and imperial palaces in order to take part in a 5-day training for trainers and career counselors. Experts with different professional backgrounds including education, psychology and career guidance have been trained on the freshly elaborated New Horizons training programme for psychological and career counselling.

The whole training programme is based on the holistic New Horizons counselling approach, which first aims at understanding the context and individual needs of the client, and lead him/her through a self-discovering journey, which will boost their self-awareness, self-confidence, and their motivation and engagement to pro-actively look out and find new opportunities. As useful part of this journey the trainers have prepared diverse materials in topics like labour market specifics and search strategies, effective communication, emotional intelligence and social entrepreneurship.

The trainers and counsellors themselves have the unique opportunity to assess their own professional and personal development during the career counselling process, using the innovative competence validation model LEVEL5.

After the positive and constructive feedback of the participants in the train-the-trainer TTT workshop in Vienna, next step will be to make the whole training programme for career counselling available in all partner languages in order to spread it out during the national TTTs end of 2017 and beginning of 2018. All training and counselling materials will be available on a specially created online social platform, available on the New Horizons’ website.

If you are inspired and ready to join us in this learning and counselling journey together with long-term unemployed people with disabilities, stay tuned on Facebook or on this page in order to learn more about the upcoming National train-the-trainer seminars in the 7 European countries.

After the successful Kick-off meeting held in Greece, the power team of New Horizons got together once again for a productive project meeting during the spring festival season in Granada, Spain. Thanks to our excellent hosts DEFOIN the project consortium managed to progress in one of the most important parts of the New Horizons project – the development of the Training curriculum and modules for counsellors working with people with acquired disabilities.

The meeting provided a stimulus to the project, enabling partner experts to collaborate, to pool knowledge and develop new thinking to assist the project objective of supporting people with acquired disabilities to build their confidence and make informed career choices.

The sessions at the meeting provided a recap on the desk research and needs analysis in each partner country, the establishment and the use of online social platform for learning and counselling services and in-depth work on the creation of the training programme for Career Counselling. The modules commenced at the partner meeting will be developed further and prepared for the Train-the-Trainer week that will take place in Austria in October 2017. In the evenings, partners had the chance to visit Granada and enjoy the wonderful city.

Energised and equipped with knowledge and shared expertise, the project partners are currently working on the development of 6 key modules that are going to be part of the New Horizons online social platform.

Do you want to expand your NEW HORIZONS as a counsellor?

If you a curious how you can develop your skills as a counsellor of people with acquire disabilities in the process of their labour market reintegration, please take a look at our project’s website www.newhorizons-eu.org or drop us a line at [email protected] to keep you updated.

Before starting with the elaboration and adaptation of the counselling programme for long-term unemployed people with disabilities, the partners in the New Horizons project decided to conduct focused desk practice research exploring the needs and the obstacles of the target groups in terms of integration into the labour market. The desk research helped the team gain better understanding of the challenges and difficulties that long-term unemployed people with disabilities face in their daily life and adapting the counselling programme to their specific situation.

Finally, the desk research will enable the partner to better reach the overall goal of the New Horizons project which is to assist people with disabilities to re-integrate back in to the labour market and society. With disabled persons representing one-sixth of the EU’s overall working-age population, and with comparatively low employment rates, European countries are obligated to address the growing number of unemployed persons with disabilities and find ways to reduce prejudice in the workforce and employer discrimination that the desk research has identified as a common problem in all European countries. While many social schemes and forms of assistance are already implemented by European countries and their governments, it is necessary to develop methods and tools that will enable persons with disabilities to fulfill their career goals and aspirations. For more country specific highlights and key figures, as well as best practices please refer to the Executive Summary that can be found under Resources section.

In the NEW HORIZONS project, dedicated and motivated experts from seven European countries – Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Spain and UK – combine their efforts in order to create and implement an innovative Career Counselling Programme for people with disabilities, acquired due to an accident or a long-standing illness that has severely affected their personal and professional lives. The project’s kick off was in Volos, Greece hosted by our Greek partner University of Thessaly.

We did some initial research and desk analysis, showing the main barriers and challenges our target group is facing when trying to be re-integrated in the labour market and in society in general. The next steps include developing and delivering a training programme oriented towards career counsellors, adult trainers and social workers so that they could provide a comprehensive psychological and career support to people whose lives and career paths have been altered due to an accident or illness.  All training and counselling materials will be available for free on an online social platform which will also include a closed group for online counselling and mutual support of counsellors and job seekers.

Finally, we are offering both of our target groups – the counsellors and the people with acquired disabilities – a unique opportunity for competence development and validation through an innovative European approach called LEVEL5.

Do you dare to look out for YOUR NEW HORIZONS?

If you feel challenged, please take a look at our project’s website or drop us a line at [email protected] to keep you updated.