In our first post, we introduced UNITE and the study visit that helped shape its design. This time, we want to go one level deeper: what does the project actually do, and why does it matter?
UNITE rests on three closely connected pillars. Coaching offers people who fled Ukraine dedicated, individual time to work through questions of professional orientation, to understand how the Austrian labour market functions, and to define concrete next steps. This is deliberately not a one-size-fits-all offer. The question guiding every coaching session is simple: what does this person need, right now? Research backs up this individualised approach: recent meta-analyses on career coaching show large positive effects on career-related outcomes and moderate to large effects on participants’ mental health, with individualised feedback consistently ranking among the strongest predictors of success.
Mentoring adds a different kind of support: guidance from people who already know the local context and can help reduce uncertainty — whether that means navigating public authorities, understanding workplace culture, or simply having someone to talk to who listens and helps make sense of a confusing new environment. International research on mentoring programmes for migrants shows just how effective this can be: across European and North American programmes, roughly half of mentees find employment matching their qualifications during or shortly after the programme, and a further third go on to further education or training.
The third pillar, learning activities, ranges from German-language cafés focused on everyday communication to workshops on digital skills and artificial intelligence that prepare participants for tomorrow’s world of work. Taken together, these three elements are not meant to run side by side — they are designed to reinforce one another. A coaching conversation might surface a language barrier that a language café then addresses; a mentoring relationship might build the confidence needed to take the next career step identified in coaching.
Why does this matter so much for the people UNITE supports? Many people who fled Ukraine arrive with strong professional backgrounds and qualifications, yet face real structural barriers to using them in a new country — from unrecognised diplomas to a labour market and language they are only beginning to understand. A standardised, one-course-fits-all approach simply cannot respond to such different starting points. UNITE is built around the opposite principle: the programme adapts to the person, not the other way around.
In our next post, we will share some early, practical lessons from the start of the Austrian pilot phase — including a challenge we did not fully anticipate: finding the people who could benefit most.
___________________________________________________________________________
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Social Innovation Initiative. Neither the European Union nor the Social Innovation Initiative can be held responsible for them.
