Impressions about “Information at your disposal” Training Course from our 4 Romanian participants

Our participants, Costin Serban, Toader Gabriela, Dragomir Marian and Tescan Franziska, returned from the “Information at your disposal” Training Course (Erasmus+, KA1) that took place in Moat Mount (London), UK. This training course approached the access to information within the EU, as many young people complain that they do not know about the different opportunities available to them and they often say that they would have taken advantage of various opportunities if only they had known about them. 

The participants had a great learning experience during this project. They were involved in different interesting indoor and outdoor activities, they made friends from 7 European countries and gathered useful information through non-formal education.

But let's see what they have to say about this experience:

"London breads cultures from different countries. Like an ancient palimpsest, the people reveal different understanding of what is to be human, making this place an incredible experience. The venue was in a natural environment, Moat Mount Open Space, during nine days of non-formal education as an engine of understanding how information flows in our days. 

The trainers, Mario Rossi and Theo Mavrosavva, used different methods for making us realize that information is not hard to obtain, but usually people do not use the tools at their disposal to reach their objectives. 

Meeting people from 7 countries and their cultures presented every evening, working with professional trainers and in different groups in order to solve tasks that helped us understand better in a non-formal way, participating at workshops and presentations held by the countries representatives regarding their current situation and what solutions they found, getting involved in outdoor activities that formed all of us as a family, discovering London by searching for information was the best way to go out in groups and explore. Friends remain after this experience, and even for some of us, participating in an Erasmus+ project leads to another awesome experience.

Those nine days were filled with all kinds of activities, each and every one of them designed to improve our skills both as individuals and as a group. One of the most interesting tasks we had assigned to us was to get a job in UK. Finding a job isn't easy - especially as a foreigner - and we would like to share with you the useful information that we gained about this topic.

Work permits are issued to a specific person for a specific job. In order to apply for a work permit there are some steps: complete the workpermit.com on-line application form; workpermit.com considers the application; if there are any issues, they contact to resolve them (this bit isn't free); then print the WP1, sign it, and post back to workpermit.com; with the WP1 there should be also copies of all academic/professional qualifications of the candidate, original employer's references covering, ideally, the last 5 years of the candidate's employment, copies of any advertisements used to try to find an EU candidate and signed client contract (if applicable) and in the end workpermit.com makes the work permit application; after 1-4 weeks, the permit is approved by Home Office Border and Immigration Agency, and is sent to workpermit.com. This information can be found on the web, but during the course we consider how many go to search for these references, the majority of the participants considered that people do not know how to get such information.

Learning these things first handed by actually talking to people who work for different national agencies was a huge advantage for us. We really feel like this project was a blast in every way possible. We learned a lot, we had a lot of fun and we all started missing that place even before leaving!" - Costin Serban, Toader Gabriela, Dragomir Marian and Tescan Franziska