Interest among Estonian and Finnish eastern border zone young people to stay home, to continue studies after secondary school with vocational education and to work in local enterprises is low. At the same time North-East Estonian and South-Karelian tourism is vivid and the local tourism enterprises are needing young, skilled and competitive people. The object of the project is to introduce to high school pupils in Narva-Jõesuu and Imatra the possibilities to get vocational education and provide work conditions in local tourism businesses and to try and change the attitudes of young people in both countries. The assumption for the vocational training popularity and respect is a priori knowledge, which will l be solved by start up program for high school pupils and by testing it on small pilot group. The project will create a network for the exchange of knowledge from experts from Saimaa Applied Sciences University and Narva Vocational Training Center and the implementiation of a small scale, attractive, accessible (equal possibilities), social (activities) vocational training program with the help of local tourism firms. The target group are pupils from Narva-Jõesuu Secondary School and Imatra Upper Secondary School. Work methods are meetings, summer schools organized in local tourism enterprises and workshops. Meetings are important to talk about values and tendencies, so the functioning network of schools and firms share the best practises and create premises for young people to continue their studies in a vocational (high) school and also to stay to learn and work close to home. The project is divided into two workpackages: management together with the communication and introduction of vocational training in secondary school. All processes are highlithed by evaluation and communication. With the help of the project the knowledge about local vocational (applied sciences) schools and the possibilities are increased among the secondary school pupils of Narva-Jõesuu and Imatra and same time the capacity of local schools to integrate the vocationa (applied sciences)l training into the learning program is bigger. After all the status of vocational education is improved. Achievements: The AVE project introduced high school pupils to the possibilities of taking vocational education and provided them with work opportunities in local tourism businesses found in Narva-Jõesuu and Imatra. The project created a network for the exchange of knowledge from experts at Saimaa University of Applied Sciences and Narva College of the University of Tartu, developed an attractive and accessible small-scale social vocational training programme and implemented it with the help of local tourism companies.