Project SummaryThe Athene Vocational High School hereby submits its 15th project grant proposal for the Erasmus+Mobility Programme. Prior to this application, Athene has submitted 14 requests and won grants for all but one; that is to say, Athene has won grants thirteen times.The reason why we have been continuously involved in the Erasmus+Programme is that its goals are well aligned with those of our school, faculty and student body. Hence our continued participation offers us tremendous benefit.During the last few decades, tourism, trade and information technology has grown markedly in the Hungarian, even during the recent economic downturn. As a growing industry, there is a high-demand for well-trained experts. Echoing the world-wide trend of the recent past, employment in the tourism, trade and IT sectors have grown.This year, for the same reasons mentioned earlier (regarding our alignment and the global demand for skills), we would like to add few new department into our application. The school, faculty, students and those hosting work placements, are collectively of the opinion that gaining international experience is important for one’s professional development. This year’s beneficiaries are those who do tourism, catering business, logistic, trade and electrotechnic studies in our school.Aside from professional, practical experience, our other objective is that our students improve their basic language skills and gain industry-specific vocabulary by being in a native environment. The project aims are to:• Gain practical, professional experience in an international, multi-cultural environment;• Achieve the goals as set forth in the ECVET guidelines;• Measure the experience & skills gained as relates to each of the studies’ modules;• Further extend the ECVET method – this year we have developed 2 evaluation surveys which we would test and then pilot;• Improve foreign language skills.The individual capabilities are essential for students to thrive in an international environment.In the summer of 2017, we will place 15 students to 3 countries.The placements will last 8 weeks for most of the students. The programme consists of 2 parts. The first part focuses on developing linguistic, cultural and work placement experience. It will be organized partly by the host, and partly by the sending or the intermediary institutions. This year too we have added an emphasis on the study of world heritage sites as such has grown in importance due to their educational nature. As part of the preparation, the students must compile their own tour packages which they must cover during their placement; such is particularly important as it serves to guide each individual. From the second week, the students will begin their work placements (in hotels at different departments). The host’s programme coordinator will mentor the students.This programme extends to four other institutions: 4 four-start hotels in Germany, a coordinating team in Ireland placing the students into hotels (as apprentices) and a luxury hotel in Ireland.Our partners play significant role in organizing several elements of this programme, such as transfer, accommodation, board, training, monitoring, evaluation and administration.Aside from fulfilling all the reasons given previously for this programme, one further significant benefit for the participating students is that they will earn a Europass certificate which will be advantageous to them when they enter the job market. Our school recognizes this placement as fulfilling the students’ obligations to intern in order to graduate.As part of the Erasmus+ program, we also organise a job shadowing tour in 2016 for 3 of our teachers in Puglia, Italy. Mobility and life long learning is also very important for them. In the Puglia region (with help of our partnerinstitute) they are planning to visit partner schools, start a longtime partnership with them and with hotels.Other main goals for them are:- Gain practical, professional experience in an international, multi-cultural environment;- Achieve the goals as set forth in the ECVET guidelines- Experience and study new teaching methods and a differend educational system.While the content and structure of this new application is similar to our previous ones, this new proposal will extend our scope to the new, participating majors refer to catering trade, logistic, fitness-wellness assistant and electrotechnic students, teachers and validate tools for our operation of the ECVET guidelines.