The semi-outdoor training course brought together a group of beautiful people from such countries as Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Spain, Turkey and United Kingdom. We have spent one week in a magnificent and enchanting place in the southeastern part of Estonia called Taevaskoda. There we have been exploring how to link outdoor educational activities to the development of soft skills in order to contribute to the youth employment opportunities in future.
From the very beginning there was a team spirit in the group which you could notice by small details: as smiley people helping out each other or sharing fascinated stories and practices from their experiences. Starting from day one, we have received a clearer picture over the soft skills and also tackled the benefits of outdoor activities in that. We discovered, that unusual and challenging environment has all necessary characteristics to foster problem-solving, teamwork, communication, adaptability, critical thinking, time management and so on.
Later on we continued with the practical arrangements. The second day was devoted to planning the outdoor training for four days. It might have seemed strange at the beginning, as the participants had to arrange all practicalities. Such as scheduling of educational sessions, division of materials and roles in the group – who is responsible for food, tents, fire, etc. All necessary calculations had been done and next day in the morning we departed.
Of course there have been many challenges on the way – we were changing our locations 4 times – sometimes not by walking, but by going through the river by canoes. Despite the weakness and being totally out of your usual comfort zone, we haven’t stopped reflecting and gaining new practices on how to develop soft skills. Strong educational sessions or activities were always followed up by quite powerful reflections – personal, in learning trios or in a big group. With every day we were realizing that the theoretical knowledge we gained was basically applied straight away in practice. Only after the whole experience, we discovered that we had a sort of simulation of lifelong learning journey. On the evaluation evening we came up with new tools, activities, dos and don’ts designed for conducting soft skills development training in order to increase the employability and attractiveness to potential employers.
As a personal experience – WOW! It has been one of those training which will stay forever in your memory 🙂 Coming with the lowest expectations I got the best and most productive theoretical and practical experience. Experiential learning is a great way to fight particular issues, as you are actually looking for the solutions and best practices considering all potential cultural or human being factors.
Softskills – Info
