The youth exchange “Soften Your Skills” took place in Zagreb, Croatia from 29 September – 03 October 2021.
Spending one week in the center of Zagreb before the start of the semester is one of the best things that can happen to you, especially when you are on a project with a topic that suits your interest. We were 5 lucky Macedonians to be selected to participate in the Erasmus+ youth exchange “Soften Your Skills” organized by the extraordinary hosting organization “Ekonomska Klinika”.
This was short youth exchange and the official runtime was for only 5 days excluding arrival and departure day. Croatia, Macedonia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Bulgaria took part of this youth exchange.
We had bunch of different activities, the first one was called “Scavenger hunt” and the goal was to explore the most beautiful parts and monuments of Zagreb. This helped to create strong bond between the participants since “Day 0”.
This project was really useful because we learned important things corelated with soft skills such as non-verbal communication, business ethics, negotiating, conflict management, constructive criticism, SWOT technique on ourselves to find our strong and weak sides.
One of the most exciting activities for every participant was the business pitch where we had to think of a business idea, try to figure out the whole concept and at the end of the day – to sell it. We were honored to attend a presentation from someone who actually has won investors money for his idea, this gave us some extra motivation to be more enthusiastic about our business idea.
Every night we had different country to represent its culture and we didn’t miss the chance to taste every single food and drink, dance some traditional dances and finishing the night in our style. We already miss Zagreb and all the people we met there.
– Summary written by Risto Bozhinov
