The project addresses the objective of promoting education and skills development in and through sport by implementing activities specifically focused on the creation of effective, attractive and immediate open educational resources dedicated to the development and implementation of labour skills that from sport can be applied to work. The main target groups of the project are two: 

• Coaches and sport instructors;

• Youths and unemployed (including cluster of migrants, also in qualified repatriation perspective) that can be supported by sport in (re)integration into the labour market. 

The project aims at promoting in a strategic way social transformation through sport in the Mediterranean region, by focusing on sport as a vehicle for promoting work capacities and employment/entrpreneurship. This objective goes in line with the main priorities of EU policies, not only in the frame of sport, but also in integration, immigration, development, security and international cooperation. In this sense Sport in this project is not an end but a “mean” (a tool) for addressing the social and economic problem of low employment, and hence massive migration processes, insecurity and terrorism threats.

The project aims at using skills and competencies acquired by coaches and sport instructors during their professional career to train different target groups in developing a set of professional skills (with solid attention to soft ones) useful to integrate them into the labour market. This will allow to create labour through sport.

Coaches and sport instructors actually should hold a set of skills that go over the mere technical ones, and that refer to soft and life skills they are trained and use in their current work as coaches and transmit to athletes and sport participants. It is less clear whether they are aware of such skills or not and whether they use them or not during their athletes’ training actions.

Starting from the necessity to train and educate people to develop or change new work skills and competencies and using an experimentation within a set of Mediterranean basin Countries, the project aims at creating awareness of that possibility on coaches/sport instructor and at constructing a set of open and educational resources to support soft and professional skill development through sport. Thus, sport becomes a sort of incubator of skills and competencies development, particularly useful and immediate for people to understand and experience, where people can test new skills and learn how to transfer them into work.

A final scope of the project is to narrow the gap identified by relevant EU-funded projects such, as Training Athletes for Sports Events Management (TASEM) in the field of sport management and education between the Northern and the Southern sides of the Mediterranean basin, promoting both inter-cultural dialogue and a common understanding of values issues.

The project, based on a three-year plan, will be based on the following work programme:

1. Project Management: The activities will be coordinated by the Coordinator with a continuous consistent contribution by ASAG Italian team. Each partner will manage its own activities within the general framework of the executive project.

2. Communication Process: is an essential and constitutive component of the “SKILLS by SPORT 4 MED” project. The targets of communication will be: i. sport bodies; ii. Public Authorities involved in sport and employment policies; iii. II.OO. such as ILO, OECD, UNESCO; iv. NGOs specialized in sport and local development. Concept, design and tools of the communication process will be developed by the Italian team on the basis o the epertise matured since 2012 in strict joint elaboration with each country. It will include press releases, short video-clips, stickers, flags, other materials functional to facilitate a community building process. Coordinator: ISCTE-IUL assisted by ASAG.

3. Research (Gap Analysis) on Sport Coaches capacity to use sport as a vehicle for development of skills and competencies functional to the labour market, articulated in three related parts:

   1. Analyse the skills of coaches and sport instructors to identify the ones they hold and the ones they implicitly transmit athletes (mainly desk research based on already existing studies);

   2. Explore the opinion of the main stakeholders and decision makers in the field of labour (i.e., HR manager, HR agencies) about the skills and competencies particularly useful to enter in the current labour market (i.e., team working, flexibility, diversity management, time management and so on…);

   3. Compare the first two points to identify the gap among the skills that coaches, and sport instructors hold, and the skills requested by labour market, to understand which are yet owned and which need to be developed by them;

Coordinator: ISCTE-IUL assisted by ASAG.

4. Training Course: Creation of a training course (packaged in open educational materials) dedicated to coaches and sport instructors with the following aims: raising their awareness on the skills and competencies they have developed through sport, support them in developing eventual missing skills requested by labour market and finally, let them become trainers of youth, unemployed or migrants of such skills. Coordinator: ASAG + Okkam + ISCTE-IUL participation

4.1 Concept elaboration and design of the Training Intervention;

4.2 ICT Platform Elaboration and Implementation;

4.3 Creation of the Training Materials;

5. Training Sessions: In the first three months of the project, two focus groups will take place in each country (one in Italy, Portugal and Greece given previous activities) to both: 1) re-engaging the main actors; 2) collect data functional to the training and engagement process;

5.1 Training the Trainers;

5.2 Training the Coaches;

Coordinator: ISCTE-IUL

6. Training Piloting: Pilot a number of training courses where coaches and sport instructors become trainers of youth, unemployed or migrants to support them in the development of a set of skills need to (re)integrate into the labour market. 

6.1 Pre-Piloting

6.2 Piloting

Intellectual Output Coordinator: ICSS

7. Quality control and impact evaluation;

8. Reporting to the donor.