Over a period of three months, a truck will travel to 78 towns and cities to provide them with training and information on job opportunities

‘This opportunity does not happen every day’, is the eloquent slogan on the sides of the four Inserta Empleo (Employment Insertion) trucks. Inserta Empleo is the ONCE Foundation’s training and employment agency that, over the next three months, will be travelling to 15 autonomous regions and 78 towns as part of the ‘Never Give Up’ campaign.

This initiative is part of the disabled youth labour inclusion plan, within the ‘Activate your Job’ project. The goal is to attract 5,000 unemployed people aged 16 to 29 from all over Spain with at least a 33% disability level and to equip them with the resources they need to improve their employability. Candidates can sign up at noterindasnunca.org. According to data from the foundation, there are 89,400 young people aged 16 to 24 who are registered as disabled but are of working age; however, their unemployment rate stands at 60.6%, 32 points higher than that of their same age group but without disabilities.

The ‘Never Give Up’ roadshow consists of four mobile units that will be travelling around Spain and will stay for 2 to 4 days in each town. These itinerant information offices are equipped with the necessary staff and materials to inform the young people who visit them of all the resources they have at their disposal to train and to respond to the current demands for employment by businesses.

Activities

Visitors will be able to participate in four types of activities. A workshop titled ‘Attitude Drives Me’ is aimed at understanding their own attitude through motivational talks and theatre games; in ‘Unique and Diverse Talents’, candidates will have to acknowledge their personal and professional talents, exploring the things that stands out the most; the workshop titled ‘The Power of a Vision’ is intended to generate a five-year career path and help them identify where they want to go professionally; the fourth workshop, ‘The Adventure Begins’, is designed to help young people write their CVs in a way that awakens the interest of businesses.

During the presentation of this project, Virginia Carcedo, director general of Inserta Empleo, stressed that “the great obstacle faced by people with disabilities when finding a job is the ignorance of their capabilities. That is why, by means of this roadshow, we want to enhance their skills and remind them that they must not give in and that attitude is very important”.