Supporting Employability through Self Development

SFERA MACEDONIA was one of the partner organizations for the project “Supporting Employability through Self Development”. SESD was a long-term project involving partners from EU and WB, interested in further increasing their capacities within youth work and supporting personal development of young people and youth workers alike.

The overall aim of the project was to create a learning space and practice for employability and personal development tools, methods and practices to be used by those working with young people (in any capacity: formal, non-formal, vocational, etc.) so as to support them in pursing diverse career prospects.

One of the activities within this long term project was a seminar organized in Durres, Albania from 1-8 June 2018. The seminar gathered 30 participants, facilitators/trainers and 2 staff members that came together to evaluate the achievements and challenges of the past months, as well as looking at the ways of improving human and organizational capacity building of young people and youth organizations through new and innovative personal development tools. The participants had the chance to share their own experience of using the tools learned during the training course that was part of the project, and propose new ones. During the seminar the participants had enough space for developing future partnerships and they already started working on new project applications.

Sfera Macedonia on this seminar was represented by 1 staff member (Katerina Popovska), 1 participant that was also present on the TC (Stojan Rashkov) and 1 participant that joined the local dissemination activity of the TC (Elena Skipova).

Here are their impressions from the Seminar:

KATERINA POPOVSKA

This seminar was a very interesting experience for me. All the workshops that were implemented were very insightful, the trainers and all the participants had relevant knowledge regarding the topic, which contributed to the successful implementation of the seminar.
We already formed new partnership with the representatives of the organizations and started writing a Strategic partnership project, which we are planning to apply in October. Fingers crossed!

STOJAN RASHKOV

During the TC in Prizren and the Seminar in Durres I managed to learn many new things which will serve me in the future development of my professional career. The greatest impact for me was that during my workshop on the Seminar about crowdfunding campaigns, I managed to inspire many of the participants, and one participant actually created his own campaign. And of course, all the new friends and moments spent on the seminar gave it a special charm.

#Erasmus4Life

ELENA SKIPOVA

During this seminar, I had the opportunity to learn from professional youth workers who are dedicated to their work, and I consider this experience to be of great use to me.

I found out more about the programme Erasmus plus, I found out how NGOs work, and all the current projects that the partner organizations have at the moment, and what are the goals they want to achieve in the future. We had the opportunity to share our experiences that gave birth to new ideas.

I really liked the methodology of the seminar, working individually and in groups, which gave us enough space to be creative. I really liked the activities where we had professional input from the trainers because I could directly learn from the given information. Some of these workshops were more useful to me and more effective. I got interested especially in the workshop about emotional intelligence.

Meeting of new cultures was also very useful and fun for me and gave value to the whole experience.