DESCRIPTION

Apprenticeships assure quality learning, decrease skills mismatch and increase youth employment. However, quality apprenticeships depend on mentorship competence and, although most mentors at SMEs are highly skilled on their technical area, they lack the necessary pedagogy to be able to transfer these skills to apprentices.
The MentorTrain project, therefore, aims to create a platform for imparting pedagogical skills to mentors, particularly experienced workers from SMEs who may not necessarily have relevant teaching experience but are working with students/apprentices from professional higher educational institutions at EQF levels 5-7.

Mentortrain will create training materials for prospective and early-stage mentors in Higher VET/PHE by:

• defining the specific competences required by early-stage and experienced mentors and use this to define learning activities which can be used to acquire these competences, structured as a common curriculum for mentorship within PHE-apprenticeships.
• creating a course aimed at prospective and early stage mentors, made up of a set of modular online micro-learning units, each of which will allow participants to master a specific competence relevant to quality mentoring.

Mentortrain will improve the competences of experienced mentors by:

• assisting experienced mentors in designing detailed training-plans for specific placements, a methodological guide on applying “A Design-Thinking Approach for Defining Placements”, will be created and piloted by mentors in four countries, across a total of 12 placements.
• creating a practice-sharing platform whereby mentors will be able to upload and share placement-plans created using the above approach, and re-use plans created by other mentors, so as to introduce an element of collegiality into placement design, similar to the collegiality which is so critical to quality teaching in higher education.
• creating a resource pack of templates and forms which can help mentors standardise each part of the mentorship process.