What special abilities do people with migrant backgrounds have? How can their strength be utilised on a individual and a social level? Globalisation and the expansion of the European Union require more and more international professional skills. This fact was taken up by the project zip.EuroCompetence and therefore the project invites young people with Italian, Croatian, and Turkish background, to develop awareness regarding their abilities and to use and broaden them in their occupational career planning.

“Those young people have very specific competencies which others do not necessarily posses“, says educational manager Norbert Kreuzkamp. Those competencies must be developed, so that they can be utilised on the labour market. The mother tongue and the intercultural background of those people are important resources for the future.

The project is managed by ENAIP, an Italian vocational training institution. For this project a close cooperation with the Italian, Croatian, and Turkish general consulate exists. How important that approach is, explains the first consul of the Republic of Croatia, Mrs Jadranka Fumic-Belamaric. “The consulate of the Republic of Croatia is supportive in introducing the project to people with Croatian background so that they will have better opportunities inn the European labour market.”

Zip.EuroCompetence aims particularly at developing the professional-, language-, and intercultural competencies of young people who undergo vocational training or who have just completed it by making a work experience in their country of origin possible. At the end of the one to two year long training period the participants receive a certificate in three languages. A future employer in another country can thus quickly see what qualifications the individual has obtained.

At home we speak Italian, but with business terms in the Italian language I am not so familiar. In day to day living it is just not used,” says the 19 year old foreign trade merchant Marco Vocino, who was born in Germany and whose parents immigrated from Italy. “Because I have already completed my vocational training I can with this certificate also have my qualifications accredited in Italy. Also in Germany it is useful if I get into contact with a company that has ties to Italy.”

ENAIP can look back on a long experience. Originally founded as a migrant association, it started organising transnational projects in cooperation with Italian businesses at the beginning of the 1990s.

With zip.EuroCompetence that experience should now also be open to others. Besides an Italian project group, a Coration group now exists and a Turkish one is in planning.

We want to know what moves people, where they come from and what they want to do with their lives”, says Norbert Kreuzkamp. “In this way it can be achieved to initiate mutual learning processes with appreciation and responsibility on sides of all involved ones. This way young people learn to take their life in a in a future Europe in a self-reliant and respectful way into their own hands.”