About TRAVORS
The TRAVORS project is addressing barriers to employment.
Disabled people represent a major component of economic inactivity in Europe. Employment is beneficial to health and is the best protection against social exclusion, but national policies face many practical obstacles in Europe, and the unemployment rate among disabled people is still much higher than the average in all countries. There is an urgent need to increase the effectiveness of public, private and NGO employment support services. Read more about background:
The Lisbon Agenda and EU policies give high priority to participation of disabled people. The National Action Plans of the partner countries all concentrate on integrating disabled people in the labour market. Reforms focusing on helping disabled people to get into work have already started in many countries, albeit along different lines. Experience in all countries shows personal advisors and rehabilitation practitioners need to be provided with the skills and confidence to work effectively.
Research carried out at European and national level has identified skills and knowledge gaps amongst staff working to place people with disabilities into employment, in both private and public sector, mainly due to the differences that exist within training and work methods. Many rehabilitation staff have excellent clinical training or work in clinical environments, but few of these have training in job placing for disabled people. On the other hand, there are many who work in employment programmes, but whose training has been limited, unstructured, or learnt on-the-job by observing the practices of others. There are few opportunities for properly researched and structured training and the use of evidence based training is unusual.
In TRAVORS we are consciously following the evidence for effective training methods and deploying skills that have been used and researched. For people in full-time work, it is often difficult to take part in in-service training away from the workplace. So we will be looking at ways to overcome these barriers – through ICT and other methods.
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TRAVORS aims to:
- develop a European solution for adjusting service providers’ skills to a vocational model of working
- provide training opportunities to personal employment advisors, case managers and career guidance specialists working to place people with disabilities into employment
- develop and pilot a train-the-trainer programme for those who will provide skills to future employment advisors
- deliver the training through innovative and flexible teaching
- continue to use the training after the end of the project, serving a wider European consumer base.
TRAVORS approach - blended learning and blended experiences.
TRAVORS will develop a new approach to vocational rehabilitation education that can be applied across Europe. In the project, we are revising and transferring a vocational rehabilitation training programme from the United Kingdom to Estonia, Greece, Spain and Austria. TRAVORS is not offering training that copies what are believed to be effective working methods, since that often just perpetuates existing practices. Nor are we just ‘translating’ what we think is a good course. The core principles of the TRAVORS training are:
Self –Efficacy is the main active ingredient in many recent interventions and training designs and goes a long way to understanding how people succeed. Self-Efficacy is a theory about how belief in one’s own capabilities to secure success in valued outcomes affects the achievement of those outcomes. In other words it explains why people act, how their beliefs impact on the success of that action and why people continue to act in the face of obstacles. Self-Efficacy has been used extensively in various branches of psychology and is being applied more and more to job-seeking and job-keeping behaviour. [Hide]
Many courses that have been reviewed at all levels of the academic spectrum appear to be knowledge-based. Knowledge is undoubtedly a good thing but these courses claim to be teaching skills, often vocational skills, yet we find it difficult to identify the actual skills allegedly being taught. Our principle, for this training, starts by identifying the behaviours required of the trainee for successful completion of the work-task and then teaches those skills broken down as micro-skills training session that build up into a repertoire mirroring the skilled complex performance. Knowledge is built in around the skills and used within the work context. Any knowledge that is useful but an adjunct to the skill can be taken out of the face-to-face scenario entirely, eg. On a web site, workbook or as part of an action learning set. [Hide]
It seems self-evident that a LNA ought to be part of a training transfer project but properly conducted LNAs are not common. The LNA contributes substantially to success because, from a Self-Efficacy point of view, the trainee needs to believe that the skills they are learning will allow them to do their jobs more effectively. This is undermined if the LNA has not been done properly, has been rushed, or an ‘off-the-peg’ or ‘sheep-dip’ approach to training has been used. [Hide]
In-work consolidation allows for the application of classroom learning to the specific job task within the live environment. Key to this, though, is that mentors, coaches and managers are able to provide appropriate feedback on performance to the learner. Once again it is often assumed that the manager, etc. is already skilled enough to do this but in our experience the manager needs preparation if they are not to get in the way of the learning by, say, poorly constructed or delivered feedback. We advocate constructing usable quality checklists, manager briefings or training to help ensure that the learner is adequately supported in the workplace. [Hide]
These are closely related concepts. Usability refers to the ease with which people can operate systems in achieving set goals (effectively, efficiently, safely, satisfactorily and comfortably) and Accessibility is the extent to which products can be accessed by people. As a minimum we will adopt usability and accessibility industry standards. These terms are often applied to IT systems and we certainly support this but we go a little further in applying these terms to the training experience in its entirety and include things like physical documents and whether the training can be accessed equally by part-time staff members or those with caring responsibilities. [Hide]
In this way we aim to enhance the professional effectiveness of vocational rehabilitation practitioners using innovative ICT-based distance learning combined with direct learning modes and incorporating a self-efficacy model of training for skills. Put simply, we aim to get better results for disabled people using existing resources and organisations.
In the project we will trial the training with approximately 100 individuals in the partner countries. They will apply the skills and be mentored during a six month period of placing disabled people in work. After evaluation, the training programme will then be adapted to its final form. At the end of the project, each of the partners will have acquired training materials that directly address the urgent problem of unemployment among disabled people.
Background reports
Description of Standards of Practice of Vocational Rehabilitation Specialists
