My experience at ‘The Advanced Digital Skills for youth workers’ training:

While I have been involved with EU Projects and project management before this training, this has been a unique experience for me. ‘The Advanced Digital Skills for youth workers project involved a great combination of digital and soft skills that served as an opportunity for me to assess my skills and identify ways to become even better.

Having the opportunity to deliver some of the workshops, I advanced my presentation skills as well as my leadership skills by taking the lead in front of the whole group of participants and setting directions for our group activities. At the same time, I observed some of the workshops that were delivered on Coding and Programming and I learned things on a topic that I didn’t know a lot before. Digital skills are a necessary competence for almost all professional sectors as well as for our daily life as we live in a digital era. The rapid technological developments require trainings like The Advanced Digital Skills for youth workers to take place more often in order to show how digital skills can be combined with soft skills in different sectors. I will always remember how my creativity has increased through this initiative. Our workshops served as a great example of how digital tools can contribute towards the enhancement of other skills, such as content creation, research, editing and dissemination.   

My week in Larnaka, with the rest of the training’s participant, has also involved a great amount of socializing and networking with new people and even trying food and drinks from new cultures. I have always been a person who likes meeting and experiencing new cultures and this training has been a very interesting experience for me in which I gained a better understanding of intercultural communication and ways to overcome communication barriers. Despite the fact that I’m Cypriot, this week served as an opportunity for me to walk around Larnaka with the rest of the participants and learn things about the city that I didn’t know before because I never had thought about exploring the city before.

Overall, this opportunity has definitely advanced my project management skills and more particularly it has helped me to further improve my presentation and communication skills.  

Rafaella Piyioti