A new video is coming out soon!
Last week we undertook some interviews with our current Erasmus+ candidates, our partners at Capacity London and a local employer, regarding their experience of the mobility programme in Sicily so far. We filmed the interviews to create a video for our YouTube channel, the full video should be up soon.
Mobility is central to the Erasmus+ strategy, we believe that young people greatly benefit from cross border cooperation. It was important for us to maintain the mobility aspect of the programme while still abiding by the Covid-19 restrictions. Thankfully, our candidates were able to travel safely, they were required to complete a swab test before leaving for Sicily and once they arrived here, they competed a Covid-19 antibodies test. Fortunately, all were Covid free!
We learned through chatting to the current candidates, who are presently undertaking their Erasmus+ placements that they are still having a positive experience here in Sicily despite the ongoing pandemic. Their experience here is not greatly changed by the pandemic, they have to wear masks while out and about and at work, and everyone is conscious of washing their hands regularly and using the hand sanitiser that is available. Restaurants and bars are still open, although customers must still wear their masks and bars must close by midnight. But this hasn’t stopped the applicants having a good time!
Many of the applicants said that they feel safer here in Sicily than they would at home in their own countries. This is also the case at their work placements; either the applicants feel like their work environment feels similar to their workplace at home, or else they feel safer and less worried at work here in Italy. We are incredibly happy that the work placements are going well, as it was a new situation for us, as well as for our partners and applicants.
Capacity London is the organisation that we collaborated with in arranging the applicants’ work placements and mobility. Rachael and Ricardo chatted to Nino and Federica about how Covid-19 has changed the way they work and communicate as well as the challenges that Covid-19 poses. One of the biggest lessons we have learned is understanding that it is important to be flexible and adaptable if we want to succeed during a time like now. We must accept that we cannot always predict how things will develop and sometimes planning is futile. We feel that as a Sicilian based company we are, culturally, innately adaptable, and although the pandemic has created its own stresses and problems, we are confident in our ability to keep moving forward. We accepted the fact that we cannot put things on hold indefinitely, that eventually we had to begin planning and working and progressing with our projects.
There has been a lot of talk about the “new normal” over the last few months and we find ourselves now living and working during a pandemic with restrictions. It really is interesting to see how we as a team have adapted and still manage to fulfill our roles and tasks, this is definitely a new normal for us.
Make sure you take a look at our YouTube video that will be posted soon, you can see what our applicants and partners had to say about working in the time of Covid-19.
By Michelle Madden