The project

Leonardo Programme

The sectorial Leonardo da Vinci Programme is an integrated part of the wider Lifelong Learning Programme 2007 – 2013, and coherent with its general aims, it is oriented to:

Support those who participate to formative activities and lifelong education in the acquisition and use of the knowledges, competences and qualifications to facilitate personal development, employment and participation to the European Labour market;
Support the improvement of the quality and systems innovations, in Institutes and procedures of instruction and professional training;
Improve the instruction and professional training attractiveness, and the mobility of the employers and singles and simplify the mobility of the workers during the professional training.

In particular, Care talents is categorized in the Multi-lateral projects for innovation transfer that allows to finance proposals aimed to adapt and integrate the innovative results/contents worked out within previous Leonardo da Vinci experiences or enterprises executed at a national/local/regional and sectoral level.

Care Talents Project

The context

The sector of the private elderly and disabled home assistance is carried out, in Italy, mainly by immigrant women lacking of a specific professional education within the assistance sector. It’s a particularly demanding job, carried out mostly by women coming from the Eastern Europe and South America, in cohabitating and poorly paid.

Then, it is a profession usually carried out for a determined period. Those who wants to look for other job opportunities in the assistive field, not including the cohabitation, they do not have the chance of an acknowledgement of the practice experienced working in this sector. About the residential and home assistance, we note, particularly on the private organizations side, difficulty in finding workers properly trained because of a labour market unobserved and irregular, and because of the introduction, in 2001, of the career brief of the social and healthcare worker that is based upon a very long training course (1000 hours, generally, equivalent to 12 months of professional training) and often inappropriate considering the real formative needs of those who operate in elderly assistance. On the other side, there is a property of competences deriving from the job experience that has to be valorised through its validation and the recognition of the capability to answer the needs of assistance and care more and more complex.

The purpose of the project

Care talents aim is to transfer in the Italian context the identification system, acknowledgement, and validation of the competences developed and experienced by workers operating in elderly and disabled assistance. A system currently utilized in France.

In particular we mean to:

Elaborate the French model, very structured and widely experimented, of validation of the developed experiences;
Value its transferability in the Italian context, translating, adapting and structuring the instruments as referring grids, procedures, exercises and relative evaluation tests for the home caregiver career brief;
Analyze how the validation outcome can be used as a formative unit to capitalize for the training path of the home caregiver and healthcare and social worker;
Experiment the model in Italy;
Verify the conditions for the transferability of the model and tools in Bulgaria (Larger part of the home caregivers working in Italy come From the Eastern Europe).

Expected Goals

The chance to verify the job experiences developed concurs the overall improvement of the supply system of services in a key ambit of the Italian welfare.
Simplify the achievement of the job evaluation path.
Allowing to define more specifically the real formative needs.
Supporting the working women professional growth, often foreigners and for the most part over forty-year-old.
More characterizing the home assistance assuring final users.

Expected Outputs

A detailed report analysing the French model of evaluation of the developed competences.
The adaptation within the Italian context (trough the research and subsequent experimentation) with the identification of the standard grids and validations tests regarding the elderly care sector.
Analysis of the transferability in the Bulgarian context.