Women@Work, the project to enhance and strengthen women’s talents 15 Febbraio 2023

A new challenge for Piano C began in March with the launch of the European Commission-funded project Women@Work in cooperation with IDEA Alzira and the Catholic University.

The main goal is to enhance and strengthen women’s talents starting from objective data that bring together the needs of women jobseekers and the demand for increasingly digitalized professions through the implementation of two synergetic actions:

– improving services, training and re-employment paths by creating innovative methodological tools designed on the basis of real and concrete needs;

– create a common framework for the evaluation and validation of skills acquired in training courses.

In this way, it will be possible to design training and guidance strategies capable of responding in an increasingly effective and timely manner to the challenges of women in today’s labour market.

To whom it is addressed

The Women@Work project refers to three main target groups:

– guidance and training practitioners either belonging to the partner organisations and directly involved in the work programme and project actions, or present in other European organizations;

– women who are at different stages of their professional and employment pathways, representatives of “dispersed human talent” as they are unemployed, badly employed, economically and socially fragile or in a precarious situation; they are the main beneficiaries of this project;

– partner organisations: Piano C, Idea Alzira and Catholic University.

Where are we in the Women@Work project: Phase#1

In order to best design the tools, we therefore start from an initial phase of detailed analysis of the current situation.

By holding focus groups and questionnaires involving trainers, digital professionals and professionals working with fragile women targets and our community of reference, we are mapping the training needs and requirements of women in the labour market. The aim is to bring out the new needs of women in the phase of re-employment in the labour market, both in terms of training needs, content and delivery methods, and of empowerment and orientation.

At the same time, a context analysis is being carried out on the digitalization of the labour market in order to have an accurate map of what the jobs of the future will be thanks to the studies of Cross, the Research Centre on Guidance and Socio-Professional Development of the Catholic University of Milan.

This first phase will be concluded by the autumn with the realization of the Needs Map, a tool that will encapsulate the results of the work and that will be presented in Spain in Alzira and in Italy through Piano C channels.

The expected impact

Women@Work is a project aimed at making a real and tangible impact on two fronts:

– towards women seeking employment or wanting to re-enter the labour market,

– towards innovation of the accompaniment and orientation method of Piano C.

Thanks to the training and guidance tools developed, our beneficiaries will be able to

– experience improved employability

– acquire empowerment,

– access better career prospects,

– increase their knowledge of labour market dynamics

– deepen their digital skills.

Thanks to the mapping of needs, the co-design of innovative training tools and the creation of an evaluation frame work Piano C will be able to

– develop innovative tools that are increasingly effective and in line with the needs that have emerged,

– refine and fine-tune the evaluation system for the results of empowerment, soft skills capacitation and short, medium and long-term impact.

Women@Work and Piano C

The Women@Work project is perfectly in line with the goals and development strategies of Piano C, with particularly regard to measuring the impact and digitalization of the services offered, as well as responding to the training and redesigning needs of women who want to find their place in the world of work.

Enhancing female talent is the key to full professional and personal fulfilment and the cultural transformation of the world of work.

Our main activity consists of providing professional re-design paths tested over the years, we have codified a precise and effective methodology based on the concepts of Design Thinking: Work Design.

One aspect to which we pay a lot of attention is precisely the evaluation of the impact and effectiveness of our training products and the Work Design method. Thanks to the Women@Work project and the collaboration with our partners, we can innovate and refine these techniques to provide even more accurate and precise answers.