1. CONTEXTInternships play a key role for young people’s integration into the labour market. They are essential in bridging the skills gap between education and work. However, the great majority of internships do not fulfil their purpose. According to a Eurobarometer study, out of 4,5 million students and graduates doing an internship each year in Europe, 59% are unpaid, 40% work without a contract and 30% have no learning content (Source: Flash Eurobarometer 278, November 2014). This results in an appalling situation where millions of young people face serious problems of social inequality and access to internships, no protection of rights and no acquisition of the skills necessary to get a job. No tools exist yet to identify and guarantee a quality internship. 2. OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT & LONG TERM BENEFITSThe aim of this Erasmus+ project is to develop tools that create transparency on the internship conditions within companies in Europe. The expected long term benefits for students are the following: help students a) avoid bad internships with low learning content and poor skill development and b) find employers that offer quality internships. The high visibility of their internship programs and the reputation at stake will incentivize employers to invest more in quality internships. This will contribute to increase the overall quality of internships in Europe. Thanks to the digital tools we develop, we intend to empower and connect the entities acting as an intermediary between the internship provider and the intern (youth-led NGOs and universities) to provide better services and security for young people. With the intended employer guide for quality internships, we intend to develop a guideline to help employers improve their internships. 3. OUR APPROACH & THE RESULT OF THE PROJECTTo reach our goals we intend to optimize and create digital tools that allow users to generate and publish large amounts of data on the internship condition within companies throughout Europe. This data will help young people assess the quality of the internship BEFORE applying. InternsGoPro developed a prototype rating system and a label to certify employers that offer quality internships. We will develop an open source plugin software enabling us to connect the information produced by the rating system, listing of labelled companies and potentially internship offers to any youth-led jobsites, university intranet or career services in Europe.4. BACKGROUND OF PARTICIPANTSThe consortium consists of 7 partner organisation from 5 countries: UAH (Spain), ESN (Belgium), AIESEC (Netherlands), InternsGoPro (Belgium), PRAXIS represented by ISEP Porto (Portugal), Inter-research (Germany), Fulda University (Germany) and EUF (Luxembourg). The partners all focus on improving the integration of young people into the labour market. At least 3 have a strong focus on quality internships. The competencies of the partners complement each other in the project. 5. THE ACTIONS TO REACH OUR GOALAction 1: Review existing initiatives to promote quality internships and develop a set of criteria to assess the quality of an internship program within a company in Europe. Action 2: Upgrade and update the prototype rating system that InternsGoPro developed based on the results from action 1. Action 3: Develop the technical infrastructure (plugin & API) that connects the InternsGoPro database of ratings and labelled employers with web sites that display internship and job offers. Action 4: Develop an employers guide for quality internships, guiding them on how to implement quality internships. Action 5: Organise a dissemination campaign of the tools to connect more platforms and generate more data from users.Action 6: Carry out capacity building activities to empower youth workers of the connected platform to use all the tools (such as the European certification scheme and statistical software).