Since February 2022, millions of people have fled Ukraine, arriving in
countries that offer safety but rarely the professional standing, network, or
sense of home they left behind. UNITE – Ukrainian Newcomer’s Integration
Towards Employment – is a new ESF+-funded project designed to close exactly
that gap. Over the coming months, our team at die Berater Unternehmensberatung
will be sharing regular updates from the project here on our blog, and we
wanted to start by introducing what UNITE is all about.

UNITE brings together partner organisations from Sweden, Poland,
Germany, and Austria, each contributing local expertise while working from a
shared methodology. The project combines three elements — coaching, mentoring,
and learning activities — to support people who fled Ukraine in finding their
footing in a new labour market. As the Austrian partner, die Berater brings
years of experience in career orientation and coaching to the table, adapting
an approach that has already shown strong results elsewhere to the specific
realities of the Austrian labour market and social system.

In May 2026, all four project partners travelled to Copenhagen for a
study visit to Væksthuset, a Danish institution that combines labour market
training, facilitator competence development, and research under one roof.
Danish research and practice make a compelling case for how integration support
can be made more effective: rather than addressing language learning, labour
market preparation, health, and civic orientation one after another, treating
them together — as interconnected parts of the same process — has proven far
more successful than a purely sequential approach.

The visit gave our team, together with colleagues from Sweden, Poland,
and Germany, direct insight into a model that has already supported many people
successfully into employment and education. We spent the days observing
sessions, discussing methodology with facilitators, and exchanging ideas on how
these insights can be translated into each partner country’s own context —
because what works in Copenhagen cannot simply be copied elsewhere; it needs to
be adapted to different labour markets, different institutions, and different
starting points.

These inspiring insights are now being built into an innovative
integration programme for people who fled Ukraine, tailored specifically to the
Austrian context. The programme is set to start this autumn, and we are already
looking forward to sharing more about its content, and about the people it will
support, in the coming months.

Stay tuned for our next post, where we will look more closely at what
coaching, mentoring, and learning activities actually look like within UNITE —
and why combining all three matters so much.

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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.