About ITONBOARD

ITONBOARD is a European project. Its title stands for "IT community onboarding programme: vocational orientation for young people".

ITONBOARD introduces young people to IT career orientation possibilities with a focus on open source software communities. The onboarding program extends from gamified career orientation activities to in-depth e-learning to facilitating the involvement of companies in a practical component.

Project objectives

Objectives

  • Introducing innovative practices for the digital age
  • Promotion of digitally-supported teaching and learning  methods in secondary schools across Europe
  • Contribution to the Europe-wide internationalization of internships and training
  • Attractive and modern alternative to classic professional orientation for a cliché-free, gender-independent professional orientation
  • Assistance for IT companies in organizing internships
  • Promotion of young talent for open source technology and communities (onboarding)
     

For students, teachers and IT companies

  • Students in the general education system are first playfully familiarized with the basic ins and outs of careers in the IT realm.
  • Teachers are provided with the tools they need to carry out IT career orientation initiatives using innovative and engaging methods.
  • Young people can use e-learning to obtain further information on their own with regard to the IT occupations in question.
  • European IT companies are encouraged to offer internships to both secondary and post-secondary students and are offered guidance to this end. Facilitation of contact between IT companies offering internships and young people looking for them is provided via an online internship exchange.
  • The project components interlock seamlessly with one another and guide students from their first playful contact with IT-related topics to the final community onboarding.
For students

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Innovative approaches

With our ITONBOARD project, we developed a modern, target-group-oriented, innovative and country-neutral form of professional orientation covering all the necessary steps — from an interest test to insights into the real world of work and internship placements across Europe.

We focused exclusively on professions in the IT industry, such as web development, web design and IT project management. English is the general language of the project, not only to facilitate the cross-border conveyance of information, but also to consolidate students' language skills and prepare them as well as possible for work in the IT industry.

Highlights

We promote Open Source

The project content is based on common working methods of open source projects and communities.

We actively involved global open source communities in our project in order to initiate students and young professionals into the world of software development. Our aim is to introduce students to the open source approach and provide them with insight into the typical work areas of software development projects.

Project council

Throughout the project, ITONBOARD has been supported by a project independent council. We are proud to be able to rely on the expertise of several distinguished people with a variety of backgrounds.

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Project modules

We developed five distinct products for teachers,
students and IT companies.

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Partners

We are an international partner consortium consisting of five partners.

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Project results and publications

The project results include gamified career orientation activities in schools in escape game form, a guide for the implementation of project weeks at schools, e-learning courses on the topic of IT career orientation, an internship guide designed to assist medium-sized and small IT companies in the design of an internship and an online internship exchange as a European marketplace for internship providers and interns.

All project results and publications are freely available on the main project portal and are designed to be transferable to other communities and technologies.

  1. 2023
    End of funding

    The support by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union ends beginning of 2023. The dissemination of project results and the support for users will continue for several more years.

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  2. 2022
    Go-Live

    All project modules have been released to the public during 2022. The launch of the portal was celebrated on Nov 30, 2022 with go-live events in all partner countries.

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  3. 2021
    Project launch

    March 1, 2021 was the official launch date for ITONBOARD.

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  4. 2020
    ERASMUS+ application

    Submission of your ITONBOARD project proposal to ERASMUS+, Key Action 2: Cooperation among organisations and institutions.

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  5. 2019
    Project idea

    A conference talk about open source community onboarding at the Plone conference 2019 in Ferrara/Italy is the starting point to this project.

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