Job orientation: training in businesses and schools (JOBS) combines two elements: labour market and schooling in the last years of lower secondary education, and the first years of technical high school or vocational education. Students are prepared for choosing their further educational career, receive general information about professional opportunities, and get the chance to acquire life skills, which are useful in any future career.

JOBS is developed by Romania’s national centre for TVET development and the Ministry of Education, in cooperation with the centre for international projects in education of Zurich University of Teacher Education. It is carried out in partnership with the University of Bucharest, and is financed by the Swiss agency for development and cooperation and the Romanian government.

Target group are students in secondary education, teachers and companies involved in VET who need to respond to challenges of continuously changing labour-market needs. JOBS focuses on developing transversal competences, targeting development of skills for life and career success.

Integrating labour market needs in compulsory education curricula and improving career guidance and counselling raise student awareness. They also urge them to incorporate realism into their career decisions, and engage them in self-managing their career building process.

The teaching approach consists of using student-centred methods such as task-based learning, which puts students in the centre of the learning process and makes them achieve tasks such as to identify, explore, question, find answers and solutions, and understand interrelationships between life and work roles, work opportunities and career building.

JOBS develops in several phases:

  • first phase (2012-14): included two pilot schools from one county in the central region, then it was extended to 16 schools. During this period seven booklets, a toolbox for students and teachers, and a teacher training programme were developed;
  • second phase (2014-15): project was extended to other counties in the same region involving 42 schools;
  • third phase (2015-16): project will be extended to two new regions, and a total of 73 schools (36 schools in north-east region and 37 schools in South-Muntenia region), out of which 37 schools will be from lower secondary education and 36 schools from technological/work-based learning.

The selected schools will appoint three teachers to be trained during 2015/16 school year to apply the compulsory curriculum using learning materials already developed in the project.

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