Abstract:

Mastering a healthy Work-Life-Flow (WLF) has become an ever-more challenging key competence to maintain an effective and sustainably enduring work performance while increasing social, physical and mental health. We propose in the frame of the Strategic Partnership project “Excellence based profiling to identify and apply tools and trainings for a better and sustainable Work-Life-Flow” (Project Number: 2020-1-ES01-KA203-083282 funded by Erasmus+) an innovative and transversal curriculum for higher education institution (HEI) students in Europe focusing on competencies for a healthy WLF.

Within the scope of the European Green Deal and the accentuated transition need towards lifelong learning, young people entering the labour market will not only face an increase in complex and dynamic work contexts but also increasingly blurred boundaries between work and nonwork in highly flexible work arrangements, both temporally and spatially. This disruptive work systems change requires a change for personal agency.

Specifically, a recent EU-OSHA report shows that the erosion and forced integration of work and nonwork domains results in longer working hours, presenteeism, more ruminative thinking after work hours, higher anxiety levels, more sleeping disorders, and generally higher stress levels. It is crucial to determine which personal competencies are needed to cope with this ongoing transformation and to achieve a healthy WLF. The WLF project embeds its competency-based approach within The European Framework for Personal, Social and Learning to Learn Key Competence and the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goals 3, 4 & 8.

Following a Personal Excellence approach, the proposed curriculum will be based on results of an online survey that will be conducted in five European countries (DE, ES, IR, XK, PT). The competences included within the survey are drawn from a systematic review in the area of occupational psychology. They comprise “hard” skills such as time-management and job crafting skills including organizational and social skills as well as “soft skills” such as specific emotion-regulation aspects and boundary management skills. Moreover, the concept of successful recovery will be treated as a learnable, necessary skill for enduring wellbeing and performance.

Based on the survey results, identified key competencies for a healthy WLF will be trained using an online learning platform based on self-assessment and self-learning methods. These timely competences will then be integrated and tested in all project partner HEIs covering business and psychology programmes. Constituting (hypothesized) fundamental cross-culturally indifferent transversal skills that are key for personal functioning in the future working world from anywhere anytime, and following the need to further democratize learning, it is aimed to provide access to the developed self-learning tool beyond WLF-project borders for a more inclusive learning society.

The WLF self-learning tool aims at increasing awareness and a better understanding of which individual factors can be self-assessed as failure or success factors for a healthy WLF and improved. Practical exercises to nuture these skills as well as evaluation methods to continuously track the learning progress will be implemented.

The WLF-project is a good example of how to accelerate capacity building for a timely skills development that goes hand in hand with economic, technological and social change.

Keywords:

Work-Life-Flow, Skills development, Personal Excellence, Occupational Psychology.