Career guidance: new approaches

Many young people wonder how to make the right educational, training and occupational choices, and how to manage their careers, in an ever-changing world. The following three Erasmus+ -funded projects show how schools together with other stakeholders can help students with these questions – with an innovative touch!

The School & Work Project

The School & Work project brought together schools and the world of work to offer young people ideas for their future, to foster their entrepreneurial skills and, as the ultimate goal, to prevent early school leaving. The project, which was implemented in 39 schools in six countries, followed a whole-school approach involving students, teachers and school career guidance practitioners.

 Discover the versatile resources the project has created for schools:

• A collection of tests to support students in identifying their aptitudes, abilities and skills, with the aim of enhancing their motivation and future employability.
• Tools to guide students in choosing their professional career, e.g. identifying skills for matching job profiles. 
• An e-learning package which consists of six modules to give information and practical ideas for career counselling for students.
• A video gallery with collections of interviews and testimonials of successful entrepreneurs and employees and other successful people. In these interviews, the participants analyse the elements that helped them succeed and emphasise the importance of school education. 

Prometheus

Ongoing adapting and improving of skills is essential in the professional life. With the fast-changing demands of the working life in mind, the Prometheus project aimed to support career guidance practitioners in making the counselling process more relevant to the needs of the new generations.

The project created an online platform with peer-networking opportunities and offered a repository of best practices, online guides and toolkits for counsellors. 

Notable among the project outputs is the 100+ Enlightenment Best Practices E-Book (available in English, Bulgarian, German and Italian), where you can find a collection of best practices for career counselling and guidance activities in the six project countries: Bulgaria, Italy, Austria, Greece, UK and Ireland. There is also an inspiring collection of Empower Talk movies, where students share their experience of using career guidance services.

Teachers who are counsellors will find the Prometheus toolkit useful; it includes a set of 26 innovative career guidance tools. More resources are provided in the online guide, developed by professional practitioners. 

The project was awarded an Erasmus+ Success Story label. 

Guiding Cities 

Career guidance can play a significant role in detecting and assisting young people at risk of early school leaving (ESL), and should therefore be part of a school’s overall strategy. To this end, the Guiding Cities project has developed strategies to improve the quality of career guidance in the classroom, and a model of guidance for communities. This includes a checklist that helps schools and communities to evaluate, plan and reach their respective targets. The project has produced many useful resources for schools:

• The Guiding Cities model and parameters help schools and communities to develop strategic partnerships and to provide a systemic approach towards the improvement of career guidance. 
• The study, Preventing ESL through Career Guidance, is a collection of best practices providing an analytical input on how guidance actions aimed at reducing ESL are designed and implemented in the partner countries. 
• The checklist, available as an online questionnaire, helps to evaluate and plan schools’ current guidance services. It focuses on seven areas including ‘Accessibility and awareness of services’ and makes it possible to identify the areas where the organisation needs to improve.

Most of the material is available in six languages. The programme took place in Romania, Greece, Spain and Italy, and it received an Erasmus+ Good Practice label.