Overview

Millions of adults arrive in Europe every year carrying skills that the labour market never gets to see. LEAP is built for one specific group inside that picture.

The project targets adults who arrive with lower formal qualifications, roughly EQF level 4 to 5, and who can often find a job offer but then struggle with something far less visible than a diploma: workplace culture, communication norms, digital routines, expectations around initiative and teamwork, and the everyday codes of a European workplace.

These are the skills that decide whether someone keeps a job, grows in it, and builds a life around it. They are also the skills that almost no existing tool measures for this group, because most assessment instruments are written for people who are already comfortable with formal testing, formal language and formal learning.

LEAP closes that gap with two connected products. First, a 21st Century Skills Assessment Tool that lets a low-educated adult immigrant see, in their own words and at their own pace, where their soft skills actually stand. Second, a tailor-made, multilingual e-learning platform that turns the result of that assessment into a concrete learning pathway, module by module, with a certificate at the end.

The project runs for twelve months across four countries and is coordinated from the Netherlands, with FURIM Institute leading the dissemination and communication work from Oslo and contributing the Life Skills half of the learning content.

The Challenge

The needs analysis behind LEAP starts from a simple set of figures. In 2022 approximately 6.98 million people migrated into the European Union, with net migration of around 4.25 million, and roughly 27.3 million non-EU nationals were living in the Union. Around 23.3% of the migrant population in Europe has been educated only to primary level, compared with 18.1% of the non-migrant population. Among young adults aged 25 to 34, only 31.8% of migrants hold a higher education qualification, 9.6 percentage points below the native-born population.

Low formal education pushes people into low-skilled work and keeps them there. But the barrier is not only the certificate. The working culture people bring from their home labour market differs from the European professional scene in ways that are rarely written down anywhere: how disagreement is expressed, how feedback is given, how much initiative is expected, how time and deadlines are treated, how a multicultural team actually communicates when three or four working styles sit around the same table.

Nobody hands newcomers a map for this. LEAP is an attempt to draw one, and to make it usable by people who are not served well by text-heavy, monolingual, classroom-shaped training.

OBJECTIVES

General objective

To enhance labour market opportunities for low-educated adult immigrants in Europe by developing their 21st century skills and strengthening their participation in European society.

Specific objectives

1. Enhance 21st century skills among low-educated adult immigrants through training modules and assessment tools built around their real starting point.

2. Strengthen social skills through content that supports integration and opens access to employment, not just to a certificate.

3. Equip career counsellors with instruments that assess skills reliably and help them guide immigrants towards better-matched jobs.

4. Promote continuous learning with educational modules that help people keep adapting as the labour market and society change around them.