UNITED KINGDOM / AGILITYPR.NEWS / September 29, 2026 / A new free guide for adult education professionals, published today by the Erasmus+ Empower project – Lifelong Learning Skills for Educational Trainers in Europe – proposes a practical method for developing the skills that allow people to continue learning after formal education ends.

The Lifelong Learning Facilitator's Guide is 70 pages long and is available in Spanish and English. It is based on Self-Determination Theory, which identifies three psychological needs – connection, competence, and control – that determine whether motivation can be sustained.

The guide translates this foundation into a four-phase learning pathway and 20 facilitation tools, each with its own steps and timelines, a facilitation note, and a printable template. The tools cover three pillars: social-emotional skills, self-directed learning, and digital well-being.

“The measure of a good session is not how much content has been covered,” says Joan Urgell, a trainer at Learnlife and head of Empower. “It’s about whether people leave with more connection, competence, and control than when they arrived, because that’s what determines whether they’ll go back and learn on their own.”

The digital wellbeing module addresses a change the partners observed in their own practice: the research cited in the guide places the average sustained attention span in front of a screen at around 47 seconds. Instead of restricting technology, the tools propose that each person analyse their own digital habits and design an environment that protects their concentration.

The guide was developed over a year with professionals from Romania and Spain, through online workshops and a mobile training program with 18 facilitators in Barcelona. Their contributions are compiled in a bank of strategies for the ten executive functions.

It can be downloaded for free at learnlife.com/empower-guia and used, shared, and reproduced for non-commercial educational purposes, citing the source.