Competence Cards, Career Cards and the website my-professional-experience.org can support counsellors in their everyday effort to help for refugees and other migrants with their occupational integration

People with migrant backgrounds still suffer significant disadvantages with respect to educational and professional opportunities. However, many newcomers have valuable experience and qualifications. In cooperation with her partners, Bertelsmann Stiftung has developed Competence Cards and Career Cards (for transversal and vocational skills) and the online tool www.my-professional-experience.org (for vocational skills) to help immigration and job counsellors speed up the identification and utilization of skills and competences.

Helge Wilters, will give some practical examples of how the Competence Cards are used to identify clients’ social, (e.g. leadership, communication), personal (e.g. resilience, creativity) and transversal methods skills (e.g. organisation, pedagogy). Ramona Lopez will explain the usage of the Career Cards. They support migrants in mapping their professional experience to the German labour market or finding out in which direction their professional path in Germany could lead. Finally, Ramona will present my-professional-experience.org which uses 20-40 photos of real life work actions in each of 30 VET-professions and asks candidates in 6 languages how often they have carried out the respective action. After 3-5 minutes the result can be downloaded that aggregates the answers in 5-7 professional action fields corresponding to actual jobs in the respective profession.