We always are happy to receive foreign learners who choose the Canary Islands for their traineeship: this is the turn of a sparkling group of 11 young learners from Austria, landed in the sunny Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for a 5-weeks Vocational Training in different working sectors.
The apprentices, all aged between 17 and 24 years old, are the selected participants of an Erasmus+ VET Mobility Project promoted by IFA – International Fachkräfteaustausch, one of our partner sending organizations based in Vienna.
The Welcome Meeting on arrival is the occasion for the incoming Tutor of INTERMOBEX to present the programme of the stay to the new arrivals. Following the request of the sending institution, during the first week of stay the group takes part in an intensive Spanish course, arranged in collaboration with a local school. It’s a 20-hours full immersion course aimed to adquire the basic knowledge of the language that participants are going to use at work and in daily life, in addition to specific technical vocabulary used in each professional area.
Linguistic preparation is followed by the First Cognitive Meetings at each host company, where participants get to know the work placements, the training schedules and their supervisors and colleagues.
Although the group is very heterogeneous as for the professional sectors in which to carry out the vocational training, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is a big city that offers training opportunities in many fields. Of course the research of the right match between apprentice and hosting company is an hard job, but in most cases INTERMOBEX is able to find work placements suitable to the profile and education of each participant. Here they are during the First Cognitive Meetings at their companies:
A training experience abroad always has its “pros and cons”: on the one hand, the difficulty of communicating in a foreign language (which can be the language of the host country or the “common language” which is English), to understand the tasks to accomplish, to integrate into the work environment, to accept and respect a foreign culture and a different life style. On the other hand, there is no doubt that international participants take the best from the experience: they learn new things and new languages, enjoying to work in an intercultural context and to live in a foreign country – often away from home – alone.
Thanks to mobility projects such as Erasmus +, people build a linguistic, cultural and memory baggage that will help them and fill them for life. During the Final Evaluation Meeting, participants always say they will never forget the experience abroad and we are grateful to have been the one who contributed to make their experience abroad unforgettable!