Marketing Through Europe (MaTE) project developed marketing learning in an international environment collaborating with companies.
HAMK was involved in the Erasmus+ funded Marketing Through Europe (MaTE) project, which ended during autumn 2023. The international project started in October 2020 and was coordinated by the Finnish vocational school Winnova. In addition to the Finnish institutions, the project partners were the Dutch Graafschap College from Doetinchem, the Portuguese INETE from Lisbon and the Hungarian Andrassy from Eger.
The objectives of the project were to study and compare the competence requirements for marketing education between the partner countries, produce training materials, enable international networking, strengthen students’ language and interaction skills, improve the competence of vocational teachers by using coaching-based pedagogical methods and digital learning environments and tools, and develop a marketing education programme.
A key objective was to develop and find effective ways to develop students’ soft skills such as empathy, resilience, problem-solving, self-esteem, confidence and trustworthiness. In order to achieve this goal, the project developed a questionnaire which was used by the students participating in the project to assess their own soft skills on two occasions. In order to achieve this goal, the project developed a questionnaire that allowed the students involved in the project to assess their own soft skills twice. The first time they self-assessed their skills at the start of the project and the second time after returning from the mobility week. The results of the self-assessments are described in separate blog articles on the project website.
HAMK’s role was to train the teachers participating in the project and to encourage and support them to develop their own pedagogical skills. In December 2021, the teachers’ project meeting in Hämeenlinna discussed the teaching and guidance methods used by the teachers, assessment and the learning environments they use. The meeting also reached a consensus on the didactic and pedagogical solutions to be used in the project. During the mobility period in Eger in May 2022, the training continued, assessing the results achieved so far and discussing the needs for improvement.
Through the project, students learned marketing skills in a work-oriented way, while strengthening soft skills that are important for internationalisation and the transition from school to work. The project developed teaching by comparing national vocational qualification standards and institution-specific curricula and by developing teaching practices. The aim of the MaTE project was to share and further develop good practice between European secondary business schools. One of the results of the project was a pedagogical model, which can be called the “MaTE model”. You can read more about this model and its pilot results in the Learning Marketing in the MaTE Project publication.
