ACCenT aims at supporting career counselors, guidance practitioners and coaches working with “hard-to-reach groups” by an innovative online learning environment offering support, training and a peer-community. Europe struggles for adequate approaches for preparing and integrating hard-to-reach groups in the European labor market. One the one side European societies are struggling with the lack of qualified workforce on the other side the long-term unemployed are not (re)-entering the labor market. Additionally over the past years millions of migrants came to Europe that could enter the European society and fill-in the labor market gaps if adequate support via counseling, guidance and coaching is provided. Therefore counseling and coaching practitioners need being supported for developing new skills and competences in order to cope with the multiple challenges European societies are facing. The challenge is a European one. Since Europe’s labor market is an open and mobile one, solutions need to be developed from a European perspective. And they need to integrate innovative concepts in terms of training provision (e.g. online) and counseling approaches (e.g. using e-tools). Counseling practitioners working with hard-to-reach groups face three main challenges: 1. increasing number of migrants entering Europe. Counselors and coaches are keystones in the process of integration in order to provide opportunities to migrants to prove their competences develop new ones and increase their chances into the labor market. 2. Long-term unemployed persons that due to multiple biographies can only be supported at a very individual level and 3. high number of young people facing difficulties moving into a first job. For a better help on both sides – counselors and beneficiaries- it is crucial to provide these career counselors and coaches with motivating further training, information, knowledge, peer-community and support. And that is the motivation of the project ACCenT! It seems crucial that European countries collaborate, accomplish shared learning progresses and gain competences to cope with this very topical subject. Countries can learn from the approaches and solutions of others in order to reach a common higher standard in counseling for challenging target groups. The main output of the project will be an online training seminar, presented in a user-friendly online learning environment, for counseling practitioners. The online training respects the need of the target group for flexible training in term of time and customizable in term of contents, comprising four main topical areas: 1. Information: The main aim of this area of the online seminar is to enable the career practitioners to accelerate and facilitate the integration process in to the labor market and thus: support long-term unemployed to re-enter, help young people to get first access and to prepare the newcomers for a successful long-term integration. 2. Social-communicative and intercultural competence: This part of the seminar supports counseling practitioners in getting aware of communication processes and cultural barriers and helps them to handle difficult cultural situations. Which are the most common cultural challenges a specific group has to face? How can the work of counseling practitioners be influenced by cultural barriers? How communication skills and styles influence motivation? How to detect cultural and social barriers? And how to overcome those barriers? Social-communicative and intercultural competence is a key factor for working successfully with hard to reach people. This area of the online course aims at providing counseling practitioners with the necessary sensitivity and awareness for their work with people from different backgrounds. They get enabled to act as mediators between different cultures and social groups, understanding the background, thinking and acting patterns of a person. 3. Coaching skills & competences: “hard-to-reach groups” of becoming & staying unemployed build a very heterogeneous group. Support is very demanding and challenging and must be provided very individually and often only be fulfilled by individual coaching. Therefore the training will be focusing on the development of coaching competences, especially technical-methodical competences: targeted restatements, identifying, listening, questioning, clarifying to help individuals shift their perspectives and thereby discover different approaches to achieve their goals 4. Using e-Tools in counseling and communication processes: The training approach will use a set of e-Tools (online meeting tools, video-chat, video, social media, scheduling, self-reflection and self-assessment, online cooperation tools, etc. for the communication and counseling process. The tools are both learning tools and learning content. All experiences and outcomes of the project will be compiled in an interactive eBook that will accessible and free to use (cc-license).

TeDiCom stands for Teaching Digital Competences. It is a project that supports educators in adult education to understand and teach digital competences, in particular for activists in social initiatives.Context:The need for an increased level of Digital Competences amongst European citizens has become increasingly relevant for European societies. Fake news campaigns, hate speech and automated bot campaigns threaten the democratic decision-making process. Democratic societies have shown themselves as particularly vulnerable to this new style of influencing. Even at the time of writing this text, activities to destabilise the European Union in the preparation of the European Parliament election, take place and threaten to increase the influence of anti-democratic or populist powers. Objectives:TeDiCom strives to increase the resilience of democratic European societies to resist this new threat. It does so by empowering adult activists to have a better understanding of digital media and their risks and opportunities.Methodology:Digital literacy has traditionally been understood as the individual’s competence to express itself in a digital environment. In recent years, together with the rise of social media, it has become increasingly important to add new competences in order to react to new tendencies in the dissemination of information. At the Davos economic Forum in 2016, the term digital intelligence (DQ) was coined to describe the wide range of competences, which cover social, emotional and cognitive abilities. In a joint communication, the European commission has developed an action plan in December 2018 to fight disinformation. The fourth pillar of this plan calls for raising awareness and an improvement of societal resilience. This pillar will be strengthened by TeDiCom.Adult education is particularly well placed, when it comes to the dissemination of these competences. The building of societal resilience in non-formal educational settings finds ways to reach those adult learners, who do not themselves perceive the demand for DQ. Many adults in our times grew up without the use of social media, and without having learned about the use of social media in the formal education environment. Participants:In our consortium, we have a group of professionals in adult education dealing with adults, who have a message that they want to spread, and that are active users of social media as sending and receiving entities. Each of us has found his or her own ways to tackle the task of digital competences in his or her organisation. With the help of our German research partner we will transform our shared experience into a working concept. At the same time, we will learn about the underlying mechanics and functioning of information in the digital age, in particular regarding the use of social media.Impact:TeDiCom will help the educators to conceptualise their existing training activities, evaluate and focus their impact to make them more relevant for the learners, more transferable for other educators and more useful for society . Activities:During several transnational meetings, educators from the participating organisations will come together to exchange good practice examples from their own organisations and from other organisations within the network. Each partner will send up to two professionals, so that we will have a good dozen of experienced educators from different sectors of adult education. Each of the meetings will be prepared by the hosting organisation, that will show us, how they have dealt with the topic before, what they have achieved and what challenges they have faced. Over the project runtime, we will have learned about a large number of different approaches. Together with the conceptual framework, we will be able to evaluate, focus and potentially the existing practices. This information will be collected and feeds into a handbook of best practices, which can be used by other professionals.The project culminates in a teacher training activity, to which further professionals from adult education will be invited. Together with this wider group of professionals, we will test and evaluate the practical applicability and relevance of our training concept. This activity serves both to disseminate our newly gained competences and to improve our teacher training methodology.Long-term perspective:It is planned to continue our project after the end of TeDiCom with a new strategic partnership, that will develop widely usable training courses for professionals in adult education, based on our results. Already at the end of TeDiCom, though, the handbook will be published on the website of the participating organisations and made available to the interested audience. A dedicated project website will help to disseminate the innovative teacher training