October 16. The final session of the training program for youth "Skills Lab: A Successful Career" was held. For one month, young residents of Mykolayv developed the necessary knowledge and skills for a successful job placement and presented eight social projects for the development of the city and region. The program is being implemented by CSR Ukraine, CSR Development Center expert organization in cooperation with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with the support of the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine, and the youth policy department of the Mykolayv City Council.

This year, the Skills Lab: A Successful Career program was held for the first time in Mykolayv and became a platform for developing the youth potential. According to recent studies, the share of new specialties will have increased to 27% by 2022, and at least 54% of employees around the world will need to be retrained in order to be competitive on the labor market.

The Skills Lab: A Successful Career program was implemented in order to prepare young people for a successful career in the future and bring their skills as close to the employer’s needs as possible. 20 girls and boys from Mykolayv region, including three participants with special needs, have completed 6 intensive trainings to develop the skills of the future. In particular, young people studied effective planning, critical thinking, time management, negotiating, creativity and project management.

Having received the necessary knowledge, the participants worked on their own social projects that will help initiate positive changes in society. As a result, eight social projects were presented at the final session of the program in the following areas: leadership (Young Leaders School, NUMO Forum), informal education (Political Literacy Crash Course educational and discussion platform, Help to a Neighbor's Child, English and Training Center educational platform, English club), leisure (quests "The Story of a Date"), and ecology (Eco Youth tree planting eco-project). Young people plan to implement all the proposed initiatives in their city in the near future.

According to Nadiia Kyrychenko, coordinator of the Skills Lab program of the CSR Development Center, now it is time to implement the program in Mykolayv. According to the calculations of the Mykolayv regional employment center, the unemployment rate among young people was about 23% in 2018.

"We developed this program to give every young person an opportunity to fulfill his/her skills and find a decent job. Particularly for this purpose, we invited the best lecturers, conducted creative challenges and exercises after each lesson in order to develop such skills, integrated into the training a video course of lectures by representatives of leading companies such as Metinvest, Ukrtelecom, Watsons, lifecell, Ukrenergo, Apercon, UKRSIBBANK, Raiffeisen Bank Aval, and developed a notebook for homework. We want our youth to stay and work in Ukraine," comments Nadiia.

Natalya Martynenko, a Program Assistant on Youth at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), also speaks about the problem of youth leaving the country: “Every second person in Ukraine plans to go abroad in search of a better future. We believe that young people should build the future in their hometown, right here, right now. I would like to wish all the participants who have presented social projects to become successful managers, form their own teams and enter with them not only the local, but also the national market, disseminate best practices in other regions of Ukraine.”

The program participant Oleksandr Lytovchenko notes that the program helped him improve his professional skills: “The information about interacting with people, making my own decisions and developing critical thinking was interesting to me. These are the three skills that I wanted to develop first of all. I dream of being an entrepreneur and having a business of my own, and this project allowed me to set my life priorities correctly.

In conclusion, the participants had an opportunity to listen to the motivational speeches of project speakers and proceeded to interviews with professional HRs in the Speed Dating format. Representatives of business companies, public and social sectors, where young people will be able to take an internship or get a job in the future, received resumes from the program participants.