Learning and training: how our experience helped us to build personal development in the community

Author: Athanasios Vasilopoulos (Alumni)/ Editor: Nicoleta Geru

Nowadays, you can find learning opportunities everywhere. There are many ways and plenty of resources available for everyone to learn almost everything. For example, there are courses, workshops, training online and/or on-site, on how to be a computer programmer or on how to be good at painting or cooking. However, all these resources can sometimes be overwhelming (especially for younger people), and as a result, it can be difficult to participate and learn. 

The main purpose of this short article is to share my personal experience in building informative and interactive trainings/seminars in the thematic area of personal and professional development to help the youth community in Greece to gain and build key skills.  

Our main challenge was how we could design and implement a training that effectively engaged young people, and how we could make an impact on them.

For me, being involved in the area of youth training for many years and having gained valuable experience through the many volunteering activities and side projects in which I have participated (e.g. in entrepreneurship and youth organisations) have helped me to understand the importance of training, and the importance of returning the knowledge to the community.

Furthermore, all the experience that I gained throughout the years (e.g. participating in Erasmus+ exchanges and training courses) contributed to building my own skills, and I was always thinking of building a learning culture in order to return these skills  to the community and help to build a better learning environment.

For me, the moment of that realisation came five years ago. That was the time that, together with similar-minded people and with the cooperation of other organisations, we were trying in our free time to organise dedicated workshops on a variety of thematic topics which usually involved boosting the culture of innovative thinking and personal development to achieve better personal and professional standards.

In our first attempts, we organised some online workshops to test the potential outcome. In our minds a specific goal that we wanted to achieve was first to have the feedback from the participants and for our training to be as relevant as possible to real world needs.

Even though it was one of our first efforts as a team, the general feedback and the active participation gave us the opportunity not only to improve the process of conducting online and interactive workshops but also to continue and pursue these kinds of activities. 

The next step for us was to begin and organise some seminars in physical space. For example, one seminar that went really well was on the theme of personal branding. We chose this topic because a lot of people are struggling to properly advertise themselves in a professional way.

We believe that by doing this, there was an even greater opportunity to build something even bigger and with greater impact than before. And we were right! 

Through this initiative, seminar after seminar and workshop after workshop, we had the chance to implement many interesting activities in different areas of interest in order to activate as many people as we could from different backgrounds and with different interests.  

Therefore, our main goal was achieved, not only on a personal level but also as a team. We managed to help and give many chances to many young people to gain such valuable lessons through this kind of activity and active involvement, and we were also able to gain valuable experience for ourselves.  

To conclude, from all these experiences and the feedback that we gathered from all the participants, I believe that we were able to give young people the very opportunities that we had learned, sharing the chance for them to explore their personalities and grow professionally through these kinds of initiatives.