About

Dual Career for Junior Athletes is a pilot project which aims to improve the awareness of junior athletes in the domain of balancing their commitment to sporting career, education and future employment.

There are 5 general objectives of the project.

• The first one is to rise the awareness of long term planning of sports career, education and employment among junior athletes.
• Second is to rise the awareness of junior athletes of the education opportunities, including in other EU member states, together with emphasisis on balancing the sporting career and education.
• Third objective is to rise awareness of dual career importance and possibilities among social support providers including parents, teachers, coaches, who influence junior athletes in their decisions.
• Fourth objective is to recognize good practices of dual career for junior athletes in participating countries and enable transferring to other countries.
• Lastly, the objective is to rise awareness of junior athletes of transferable skills they build during sporting career, which they can use in the future for employment.

To achieve those objectives, below listed actions will be taken:

1. Developing a baseline picture of what difficulties are the junior athletes facing in terms of combining education and sport career and how to overcome them.

2. Mapping of dual career for junior athletes practices in the countries of project participants and creating a good practices database, to enable transfer to other Member States, at local, regional and national level.

3. Education of junior athletes and the social support providers in the opportunities for dual career by providing online and offline tools for gaining the awareness.

In order to facilitate above mentioned actions, the following intellectual outcomes (IOs) will be delivered over a period of 36 months:

IO1 – Dual Career of Junior Athletes baseline report

IO2 – Dual Career of Junior Athletes good practices report

IO3 – Massive Open Online Course on Dual Career for Junior Athletes

IO4 – Massive Open Online Course on Dual Career for social support providers

IO5 – Handbook for Junior Athletes on Dual Career

Following the implementation of the actions and creation of Intelectual Outputs the Junior Athletes and the people influencing them the most will have a vast knowledge of possibilities and dual career practices, which will positively influence the athletes at the junior stage. Addressing the needs of the athletes at early stage of development will contribute to their wellbeing in the professional or senior level of sporting career. Moreover, mapping the good practices on the policy making level, will enable other Member States to implement the best solutions for dual career of junior athletes on various levels of governance.