SOFT SKILLS AND CREATIVITY SELF-PROMOTION TOOL

An Empowerment & Self-Improvement Plan, done as the start for this Output, devotes attention to the promotion and self-promotion to consolidate and give visibility to the volunteers’ soft skills and creativity potential, properly evaluated and strengthened, through instruments of empowerment. The Soft Skills and Creativity Self-Promotion Tool provides a detailed description of the intervention in all its phases and activities. It comes to complement what has been done with the previous output, i.e. the assessment of soft skills and creativity.
It assists volunteers (and prospective job applicants) in promoting those skills and creating a plan for their promotion; and it provides them with the instruments they need to use for presenting and taking advantage of their soft skills in a more effective way. These instruments are a portfolio/E-portfolio, a video CV, professional social media, and a promotional strategy. They are described in more details below.

The aims of the Self-Promotion Tool are:

• Showing how the individual background of the volunteer can be used as an advantage;
• Make the volunteers (job applicants) aware of the use and the usefulness of a portfolio/E-portfolio;
• Create a portfolio or E-portfolio that can be used to showcase the soft skills of the volunteer and to complement his/her effort to improve in their job or obtain an adequate job;
• Make the volunteer aware of the use and the advantages of a video CV;
• Create a video CV that complements the traditional CV and showcases his/her soft skills;
• Making the volunteer aware of the power of professional social media and its use;
• Create a professional social media profile;
• Create a promotional strategy.

The Promotion and Self-Promotion Tool is organised in three different sections:

1) The first section introduces and presents the output and describes purposes, approaches and the proposed pathway;

2) The second section contains guidelines for the management of activities and describes the administration and the steps of this pathway and for each step the activities and the tools to use. For each activity, there is a specific sheet where one finds all the information necessary for the management and some recommendations for the staff involved in order to highlight some suggestions and operative lines useful for the delivery of the activities.

3) The third section contains all the Tools used during the pathway.