The project aims at promoting and validating social, personal and organisational key competences such as entrepreneurship, civic competences and learning to learn with the help of an innovative, self-directed learning approach at the interface of higher education and business.Social and personal key competences are hardly to be acquired in lectures, frontal teaching and self-learning.The ideal learning contexts to develop these competences are informal/non-formal learning contexts such as learning in mobility and in traineeships.However, up to now only singular attempts have been made to assess these competences, to give evidence of their development in the learning activity, to connect them to existing certification systems and to offer a European wide validation approach.PROMOTE will develop and pilot an approach to tackle this issue based on a long term partnership of academia, business and educational partners from all over Europe.The traineeships will involve students from 7 universities will be carried out in businesses or enterprises in different EU member-states (students will have the opportunity to travel to other EU countries to undergo their placement). The innovative momentum of these internships is that they work along a project management structure; each trainee has to plan, develop and assess his or her project, which is leading towards at least one of the key competences described above.The innovative momentum of these traineeships is that they work along a combined project management and self-directed learning approach – each trainee has to plan, develop and assess his/her project which is heading towards at least one of these key competences.In the framework of the project well-proven evaluation approaches (6 LEVEL5 projects, EDUCCKATE) will be applied to assess and evidence informal learning in different mobility learning environments and traineeships.