Skills for Tomorrow: What an Erasmus+ Mobility Actually Teaches

This week, from 12 to 17 October, organisations across Europe are marking the ErasmusDays. The theme of this tenth edition is "Learning and growing: skills for tomorrow."

It is a good theme, and a harder one than it looks. Everyone agrees that a mobility builds skills. Far fewer people can name them.

So this is an attempt to be specific, based on what participants hosted in Malta actually describe when they are asked at the end — and on the one question that produces a useful answer.

The question that works

Ask someone how their Erasmus+ went and you get the same reply every time: it was a great experience, I grew a lot, I met amazing people. All true, and all unusable.

Ask instead:

What can you do now that you could not do three months ago?

That question produces something different. It forces a specific answer, and the answers tend to fall into three groups.

Professional skills: the ones the course was for

These are the obvious ones, and they are more concrete than a CV line suggests.

A pastry student spends three months in a working lab and learns something her school could not teach her — not a technique, but how a kitchen is organised when the volume is real. As she put it herself: "I understood the different ways of managing work when you work a lot."

A participant at a diving centre takes bookings and coordinates clients. The skill is not diving. It is handling a customer who wants something you cannot give them, in a second language, in a situation where the answer matters.

Students in mechatronics work on ship maintenance — a sector Malta has because of where it sits in the Mediterranean, and one most of them had never seen from the inside.

In each case the course prepared them for the field. The placement taught them what the field is like at eight in the morning on a busy day.

Language: the moment it stops being a subject

Almost every participant arrives saying they want to improve their English. Almost every one of them describes the same shift at the end.

English stops being something you are tested on and becomes something you use to get through the day. You use it to ask where something is kept, to explain that you did not understand, to answer a customer, to apologise, to make a joke that lands badly and try again.

That is a different competence from the one measured in a classroom, and it is the one that stays. It also tends to arrive faster than anyone expects — usually in the second or third week, when the effort of translating in your head quietly stops.

The personal skills nobody puts on the timetable

This is the group participants mention first, which is telling, because it is the one no project application lists as an objective.

Independence. Working out a bus route. Managing a shared flat with people you did not choose. Deciding what to do when something goes wrong and your parents are three countries away.

Money. For many participants it is the first time managing a budget that has to last until a specific date. It is a skill that is almost impossible to teach in advance and almost impossible to avoid learning abroad.

Working with people who are not like you. In a given month in Malta, participants from several countries overlap in the same workplaces, the same apartments, the same evenings. Intercultural competence is a phrase from a project form; in practice it means sharing a kitchen with someone whose idea of dinner time is two hours off yours.

These are the skills that change how someone behaves afterwards. They are also, not coincidentally, the ones participants are still talking about a year later.

Why the theme matters for staff, too

This year's ErasmusDays also put the role of teachers and trainers in focus — and that is the part of the programme most schools have never used.

A teacher who spends two weeks abroad, in a language course built for education professionals or shadowing colleagues in another system, brings that back into every class they teach afterwards. The mobility ends. The competence does not.

For an institution, staff mobility is the version of Erasmus+ with the longest tail.

What this means for a project

There is a practical consequence to all of this.

A project that names the skills it expects participants to develop — specifically, by sector and by level — is easier to run, easier to evaluate and easier to report. "Students improved their professional competences" says nothing. "Students on a mechatronics course carried out maintenance tasks in a marine workshop" can be assessed.

And for the participant, the specificity is what makes the experience portable. Nobody hires someone because they grew as a person. They hire them because they handled customers in a second language, or managed their own time in a workplace with real deadlines.

Happy ErasmusDays

Behind every mobility there is a school that applied, a company that opened its doors, and a participant who arrived not knowing anyone. That is worth marking for six days a year.

If you are planning a mobility for the coming year, tell us four things — how many participants, what they study, the dates and the duration — and we will tell you what we can host.

Your Erasmus project, our mission.