The IGTrain project, approved in the framework of the Grundtvig Programme by the European Commission in September 2013, will end in September 2015. The 6 partners of the Consortium (AT, BE, BG, IT, P, TK) now begin the last stage of the project.
The ITGrain project which is focused on intergenerational learning on the workplace aims to enable workers of age 50+ to pass on their work experience to the young workers of their company, becoming their mentors. For this purpose, the IGTrain consortium developed a teaching tool, the Trainer’s Guide, which presents some of the most important characteristics of an efficient knowledge/competencies transmission. This tool was improved over time through several analyses based on both direct experience derived from the project trainings stages and discussions among the partners.
Recently, the on-the-job training phase has been implemented by the partners of the project. During this phase, the information included in the Trainer’s Guide has been directly used by the mentors, themselves trained with this same tool in a former stage of the project. These 50+ workers who accepted to participate in the piloting phase have now been able to make their own mentoring phase with their younger colleagues. This new stage, thanks to the feedbacks coming from both mentors and mentees, showed to the consortium some sections of the Trainer’s Guide that could be further improved. Moreover, it underlines the positive impact of the mentoring on both the mentor and the mentee. In fact, while the mentor realizes the importance of the transmission of his long work experience the mentee often feels more motivated when he leans from a colleague rather than from a stranger. Of course, the employers generally appreciate the fact that this training finally improves at the same time the efficiency of the new employees, the global quality of the relationship between employees and their motivation at work.
In September national events will be held in each of the partner countries and at the end of September a final conference will be organized in Brussels to present the results and products of the projects. Amongst them, two multimedia products will be presented to the public.
The consortium encourages all organizations and companies interested in the IGTrain project or the implementation of this type of training to contact and join this innovative initiative.