Meeting in IDRIJA, Slovenia

ROUND TABLE on competences

In our school, we organized a discussion using the technics of a round table as a part of the Erasmus+ meeting that we hosted at that time. This means teachers and young people from seven different countries – Slovenia, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Spain and Italy participated.  Our topic to discuss was what competences do young people need in their future work life? Therefore, for more actual information we invited representatives of some local companies like Kolektor, Hidria and Ydria Motors. We asked these representatives and the young people from every country to search for information in their towns that we’d be able to compare our experience with theirs. The questions we prepared for them were: do you think young people are taught these competences at school? Any suggestions how they could develop the competences they don’t have? Would you be willing to cooperate with schools to promote the development of these skills and competences? What aid do you offer to young people, in regard to future employment? In what areas do you offer employment to young people? Do you believe young people have a place in the town? What are your thoughts on the brain drain in your town?  What measures do you believe should be taken to combat the issue? 

Austria set out that it’s important to present your own opinion, think critical, have negotiating skills and to make compromises in critical situations. Their suggestions how to improve these skills were writing more essays on your own would prepare you to present certain topic and be critical about it, teachers should focus more on teaching us how to be critical and they also think that it would be good to cooperate more with some local companies.

Denmark presented us a video, in which they went around their town and interviewed some representatives of local companies.

In Finland, they found out that some of the important skills are flexibility, empathy, patience, good manners and the ability to solve problems. They think that the best solution would be to get a job and learn these skills there. In their town, local supermarkets offer 14 days of work practice.

Poland pointed out being responsible for your own actions, to be able to work in groups, to know how to use different technology (which is not such a problem in our generation), to be flexible to all kinds of different situations and people and of course to be happy with what you do. They said that school doesn’t teach us how to be adults but they are only putting facts, we’ll need on tests, in our head. In school, we actually learn something important and that is that we need to be responsible and give away school papers on time. And one thing we all agreed on in that learning languages is important.

Spain thinks that creativity, communication, being self-critic and languages are the most valued competences there. Their argument was that we do learn competences in school but only in theory and we don’t use them in practice, a suggestion was that we should have some exercises of real life situations which we would try and solve. Students there are also interested in cooperating with local companies.

In following conversations we discussed how to gain those competences with representatives of our local companies and they pointed out what competences they are looking for. The answers were quite similar and in conclusion flexibility, job satisfaction, motivation and passion are top four competences. They can be gained with hobbies, volunteer work and being involved in projects like Erasmus+. Our companies are also offering work practice, summer jobs, scholarships and Kolektor for example is also cooperating with factory in Germany. The main problem is that those jobs base on technical school background, which leads us to closure that finding job for a technician, is much easier in Idrija. 

We also agreed that ‘brain drain’ can be considered as a problem. At first young people who live in smaller towns go to bigger cities to study, get certain knowledge. Lots of them also go abroad to earn some experiences. Some of them go just because they like to travel, explore foreign countries and that’s okay. But in their hometowns they are often not able to find job and that’s what is keeping them away. They find employment in big town and they stay there. Now the big question is what we can or better said should do to prevent migrations of young intellects? In this case we should all be inspired by Denmark. As students said: ’’After education in big towns they move back to smaller ones. They also get paid for school so it’s easier to have small apartment in town.’’ And are they afraid not to get job? NO, because if they don’t get job they get support from the state so they can find one. So in Denmark if you are 18+ and you are educated you get some amount of money that helps you to find job.

After that topic we jumped to creativity, in our opinion one of most interesting parts of debate. For the start we asked ourselves what creativity actually is. We got different responses by students and teacher that creativity in their opinion is graffiti, painting, blogs, being yourself…And none of them was wrong. In words of Italian student CREATIVITY IS A WAY TO BE IMMORTAL and according to representative of Kolektor creativity is about finding new ways of solving problems, to improve existing solutions not just creating new products. We were also reminded that we often confuse creativity and technology. Everyone can make a movie with their phone but creativity takes time and in the end you don’t need expensive equipment to express yourself. Teachers also pointed out that we can’t be creative on command and here is the point where we, students agree with them. In our opinion school doesn’t give us enough space or enough freedom to express ourselves. Teachers give us thousands of definitions every day that we have to learn by heart and we don’t even try to understand half of them because we don’t discuss them, we don’t emphasize their meaning. As simple as that we opened a new topic that left lots of open questions so it may be excellent starting point of another round table.

For the end we saved question: ’’Are we active enough?’’ Well it depends, but for sure students and teachers who participate in InTime21 and similar projects are active and willing to change something. With collaborating in these kind of activities we don’t just gain competences, we also get prepared for future life and obtain certain knowledge that school can’t give us. With these words in mind we are all anticipating the next meeting in Spain. 

Špela Bratuš & Carolina Petrič