The "Program Your Success!" project is a two-year-long plan of actions directed at almost 1000 students aged 13-15 from partner schools from Poland, Turkey, Romania, Italy and Macedonia, who are about to take an important decision connected with their future - they are about to choose a high school, which can define their further path of the educational career, as well as, in more distant future
- the professional one. All the partner schools are located in similar areas as regards the economic profile, which should be described as agro-industrial one. However, the places of employment that operate there do not belong to the biggest players on the job market on the national level.
One of the reasons for preparing the project was the fact that the Polish education system made it obligatory for primary schools to teach programming to students and to run separate career counselling classes (in the past, some elements of career counselling were introduced by form teachers during weekly class meetings or during some ad hoc classes run by external staff).
Unfortunately, there are no precise guidelines as regards the scope of their content or the way the teaching should be done. Hence the idea of getting inspiration from partners who are more experienced in this field. Moreover, Eurostat's statistics keep showing that there are great discrepancies between the needs of the job market and the competencies of the potential employees due to a lack of systemic solutions connecting those two groups of interest already in the process of occupation-oriented education. That is why the actions included in the "Program your success!" project involve direct meetings of its beneficiaries with the representatives of local entrepreneurs from the areas of partner school's locations.
The aim of the project is to develop programming-like thinking and soft competences, to improve communication skills in English, to use ICT tools, to popularize the idea of career counselling and entrepreneurship, and to exchange experiences in those areas between partner institutions. The direct beneficiaries of the project are both students and their teachers. An international character of the venture will cause that accomplishing the project tasks will lead to breaking intercultural barriers, overcoming stereotypes and equalizing chances. The schools participating in the project will exchange knowledge from the field of methodology of the above-mentioned skills-building classes, as well as the experiences connected with the use of various tools during such classes. Because of the fact that the partners have different experiences in those aspects, their contribution to particular project tasks will differ as well, but it will also be precious to verify how some solutions used in one school work with the remaining partners. There will also be an opportunity to work together on improving the already existing schemes.