Abstract:

Unemployment in France reached a record score of 1.6 million people, with the unemployment rate among the youngest having increased more than threefold in 40 years (INSEE 2017) and with women occupying the majority of the precarious jobs (INSEE, 2014). According to the CEDEFOP (2018) long periods of unemployment tend to become more frequent, and the lack of qualifications and skills persists. This can lead to a deterioration in physical and psychological health conditions and once marginalized, these people no longer use public employment services and find themselves "off the radar".

In order to tackle this issue, the Ministry of Labour in France launched a call for projects to detect and facilitate:
(a) the experimentation of new solutions for the inclusion of the most vulnerable people,
(b) new approaches to remobilization towards employment, development and enhancement of the skills of these groups.

In this context we proposed an action aiming to re-mobilize people towards sustainable employment and entrepreneurship. This action, called Réalise Tes Rêves (Make your dreams come true; RtR) was selected as one of the awarded projects for 2019 and is currently being implemented.

This research-action scheme proposes to experiment pedagogical approaches to mobilise, support, develop and enhance the skills of these populations in order to reverse the paradigm of the labour market, taking into account people’s identity, skills, resources, motivations and vocations. Thus, the idea is not only to create a link between the labour market and the unemployed, but also to build a sustainable and fulfilling inclusion.

Thus, the objective of this study is to assess the impact of the RtR project on participant’s socio-emotional and technical skills, well-being, employability and motivations.

Method:
Design: Longitudinal cohort study.
Participants: 1500 NEETs (Instance, Rees, & Williamson, 1994) and unemployed women with no age exclusion from three French cities : Lille-Roubaix, Île-de-France and Marseille.
Procedure: Participants have the choice between the path towards sustainable employment or the path towards sustainable entrepreneurship. Before choosing their path, they answer two sociodemographic questionnaires and undergo a biographical interview (Demazière, 2008).

Then, they answer online standardised questionnaires (e.g. “Brief Hexaco Inventory”, De Vries, 2013; “Compound Psychological Capital Scale”, Lorenz, Beer, Putz, & Heinitz, 2016) to measure personality traits, wellbeing, self-esteem, and psychological capital. Then, they begin their path. During the course of their path, they complete standardised tests to assess their evolution (e.g. Orientation Competencies, Maggiori, Rossier, Savickas, 2015), complemented by ad-hoc questionnaires specific to the workshops attended and end-of-month assessments. At the end of the paths, they answer again to the pre-test questionnaires. Afterwards, they have a biographical interview. Six months later, they will be contacted for a follow-up biographical interview.

Data will be analysed in terms of evolution of the participants following their participation in the project and to evaluate the impact of it on the development of social, emotional and technical skills. Details of the pedagogy, the research methodology and preliminary results will be presented and discussed.

Keywords:

NEETs, women, unemployment, wellbeing, entrepreneurship, method.