Blue background, professional teacher ambient

Hello and welcome!

My name is Ivona Čarapina Zovko, and I am delighted to welcome you to this EUPeace Soft Skills course on Problem Solving for Employability.

Employability is more than preparing for a job application or making career decisions. It also involves recognising your competences, adapting to changing circumstances, communicating effectively, working constructively with others, identifying available resources, and responding to complex real-life challenges.

These competences are particularly important in community engagement, where students, professionals, institutions, and community stakeholders often collaborate across different perspectives, expectations, priorities, and available resources. Such situations may involve uncertainty, disagreement, limited resources, or the need to adapt plans as circumstances change.

Throughout this course, you will explore practical strategies for analysing challenging situations, recognising your own strengths and transferable competences, communicating your ideas and contributions clearly, identifying social and psychological resources, and developing resilience and adaptability.

You will apply these skills to realistic situations related to employability and community engagement, with a particular emphasis on collaboration, informed decision-making, ethical participation, and constructive problem solving.

This course is fully asynchronous and self-paced. You will complete short learning inputs, practical activities, reflective tasks, self-assessment exercises, and automatically graded knowledge checks. For applied activities, you will be able to compare your work with model responses and self-assessment criteria so that you can evaluate your own progress independently.

I encourage you to engage actively with the activities, reflect on your own experiences, and consider how the competences developed in this course can support you in academic, professional, and community contexts.

I wish you an enjoyable and valuable learning experience.

Learning outcomes

After completing this course, you will be able to:

✔ analyse common challenges in community engagement contexts, including competing interests, limited resources, and uncertainty

✔ evaluate your own roles, strengths, transferable competences, and self-perception in relation to community-based work

✔ apply structured problem-solving strategies to make informed decisions in collaborative situations

✔ communicate your competences, ideas, and initiatives clearly to different stakeholders

✔ identify and mobilise relevant social resources, networks, and support systems

✔ recognise and use psychological resources that support effective collaboration

✔ develop resilience and adaptive coping strategies when responding to uncertainty, disagreement, or setbacks

Course structure

The course is organised into five learning modules:

  1. Community Engagement and Diversity

  2. Self-Perception, Roles, and Transferable Competences

  3. Communicating Competences and Initiatives

  4. Social Resources, Networks, and Support Systems

  5. Psychological Resources: Resilience, Adaptability, and Coping

Each module combines short learning materials with practical or reflective activities. Some activities include automated feedback, while others provide model responses and self-assessment criteria.

Estimated workload

Activity Estimated time
Videos and learning materials ~90 min
Practical and reflective activities ~90–120 min
Self-assessment and feedback activities ~30 min
Total workload ~4 hours

 

Before you begin

To get the most from this course:

  • complete the modules in the recommended order

  • actively participate in the practical and reflective activities

  • use the model responses and self-assessment criteria to review your work

  • pay attention to the automated feedback provided in quizzes and knowledge checks

  • relate the activities to your own academic, professional, and community experiences

  • reflect on how your competences and resources can contribute to collaborative problem solving

  • monitor your progress as you complete the required course activities

Once you have completed all compulsory activities and met the course completion requirements, you will be able to proceed to the final course section and access your completion certificate.