The Opportunities fair is an event format we at Kolba Lab have designed together with “Career lab” center, which aims at building a bridge between the youngsters and the employers, by creating the connection for them to communicate and have a platform to find one another. The youth is in search of various opportunities from university years already, they want to gain skills that they will build on and slowly but steadily go up the career ladder.

The Opportunities Fair not only gives a chance for the youth to find relevant jobs and internships, but also provides trainings on certain skills, such as crowdfunding, writing a resume and cover letter, entrepreneurship skills, 3D graphics and animation.

These are some areas where the youth will have to have basic skills for being able to start a career in specific fields and the fair is the place to gain all of this in one place as a one stop shop.

We were very happy to organize the third opportunities fair on November 12 in Gyumri, Shirak region, which is the one of our target regions for “Future skills and Jobs” project.

The fair was different from the previous two, as this time, we also organized a separate high level panel discussion on the topic of “Future Skills.”

Dmitry Mariyasin, UNDP Resident Representative, Tigran Petrosyan, Shirak governor and Aram Pakhchanyan, Head of “Ayb” school were the panelists who shared their insights on job opportunities in regions for skills building and job search. They were very supportive of the event, mentioning that such events will provide the young people with answers to all the questions that will help them to have a better understanding of the trends of future labor market.

We were also happy to host Dmitry Stepanov, the counsellor of the Embassy of the Russian Federation to Armenia, who talked about the projects that Russia Trust Fund is funding in Armenia, with a goal to create better conditions for the Armenian youth to give them opportunities for using their potential in the local labor market.