Published on: Sunday, 18 September 2011

CIT, in collaboration with three European partners, has secured €265,000 in funding from the European Union Leonardo Fund to develop online role play training which will help Social Enterprises improve skills that are critical to business success.  Plymouth University is the lead partner in this consortium.

The two year project will see CIT researcher Dr Paul Walsh and his team work with European partners UNINA (Naples, Italy), Plymouth University and GeProS (a German Consultancy Company) to develop state of the art e-learning scenarios that will allow significant numbers of people working in social enterprise to access a training resource which will improve soft skills and subsequently enhance their organisations capabilities.  Soft skills, also known as interpersonal or people skills, include team working, negotiation, communication, time management, active listening, assertiveness and proactivity. This training product will be offered free of charge to social enterprises and other not-for-profit organisations across the European Union.  Instructor support materials will be developed to allow trainers to easily use the product to help deliver the soft skills training scenarios.

Project Coordinator and Associate Professor in Business Operations and Strategy Dr Jonathan Moizer, said: “This is an exciting collaborative project which has the potential to benefit a huge amount of people, not only those involved in Social Enterprise but others studying in higher education settings.  We anticipate that once the learning scenarios are finalised, we can not only provide training support for social enterprises, but can also integrate this learning resource into university level teaching.  The training product provides a safe environment for people to ‘learn through doing’ where there are no real world consequences to their actions.  It also allows trainees to re-play the scenarios in order to improve their soft skills.”

Contact
Dr Paul Walsh
Department of Maths and Computing
Cork Institute of Technology
E: paul.walsh@cit.ie
W: http://www.pwalsh.net