Empower yourself

What it is: Empower yourself (original in French: Valorise toi) is a self-assessment tool of skills acquired in the framework of volunteering in the French scouts’ movement (‘Scouts et Guides de France’). It translates skills acquired through scouting and volunteering into language appropriate for the job market.

How it works: Empower yourself is a leaflet for young people making applications to their next level education or young job seekers, allowing them to ‘translate’ skills from volunteering into competences that apply to the job market. The simple leaflet breaks this process into four steps:

  1. Scouts choose from a list of statements the experiences or activities they have completed, (e.g. ‘I am aware of my responsibilities in my role as a leader of my unit / group or as the camp chief’), and assess their level of strength for each activity. These are then clustered in a way that translates into competences that help in the job market, e.g. ‘organisational skills’, ‘responsibility’, ‘sense of initiative’, analytical skills’, and so on;
  2. Students are asked to illustrate the skills with personal examples;
  3. They put the skills into context towards their chosen career;
  4. A user manual prepares scouts for their job interview. Empower yourself is available in Czech, Danish, English, French, Polish, Serbian and Spanish.

Benefits: This simple reflection tool translates non-formal learning into employability skills. The method is simple and transferable to a wide range of environments and is low cost. The tool works within a structured and detailed skills framework and clearly identifies skills and experiences and how to translate this into the language of and skills for employment.

Challenges: As the tool is to be used offline (PDF for download only), no user identification or data collection is possible. Neither is an analysis of user skills/ responses included as part of the tool.

Relevance for entrepreneurial teaching: Empower yourself translates civic competences acquired through non-formal learning experiences into skills that are applicable to the job market. The method used to define the skills and translate them is applicable to a range of environments.

Applied assessment methods: Assessment of skills.

Examples from practice: According to case studies, Empower yourself has been used by over 30,000 young people in France. Feedback from employers and users is positive.