ELS@Work - European Languages for Secretaries

Partners' Institution:

Bildungswerk ver.di

Project's period (from/to):

November 2007 - September 2009

WP concerned:

WP 6 - Experimentation and evaluation of the portal

Objectives of activities carried out:

Involvement of 60 SME's in the portal

Description of activities carried out:

Bildungswerk has developed promotional and dissemination material in order to inform SME's, potential participants, print media and multipliers for adult education of the possibility to participate in the els@work project.
After mailing via post or e-mail we have contacted the recipients, most of them several times.
Beginning in March 2009 one member of the project team did custumer aquisition by telephone regularly.
A list of more then 300 SMEs located in the regional area of Hanover was prepared with contact persons. All contact persones were called up, results of talks documentated and if wished material and enrolement documents sent.
Bildungswerk put information on his homepage about the project aims and oportunities for participating in the els@work project as well as Nordmedia,the official Mediacompany of the states Bremen and Lower Saxony.
German Trade Union was informed about the project in an internal newsletter.We also could use a mailing list of the German Union for Services with adresses of members of the workers councel.
One workshop was held in Berlin, 27th May 2009,with 46 participants from 2 companies.

Outcomes:

We developed several documents to inform potential users or multipliers:
Letter to present the project
German brochure of ELS@work
manual how to participate in the portal
Power Point Presentation about role and benefits for SMEs and participants
Power Point Presentation for "didacta", German educational fair


With September 2009 we could reach 80 participants from 30 SME's enrolled for the language courses.

Evaluation of the work undertaken:

Development of the German moduls needed much more work then expected.So we started promotional activities later then foreseen.We did not consider that it took much more efforts to get access to SMEs and participants. Although we had contact to more then 3 000 (three thousand !)potential customers and SMEs the participating rate isn't satisfying.One obstacle often heard was the company participation letter especially the passage: "The undersigned (name) authorise Pixel to use the data ... and to publish (!) the data...both on paper and on-line".Either enterpreneurs, bosses or superiors didn't want that or responsible persons from the department of human ressources development were not allowed to do that not until they got permission by the board, general manager etc. which was in reality a mission impossible.