DigiCards: Digital Competences Cards (January-December 2024) aims to design a user-friendly and tailored digital competence cards tool for career guidance counsellors.
Between March and May 2024, LLLP conducted two research activities, a focus group and an expert interview. The focus group aimed to better understand the needs of the counsellors. The expert interview to know about the state-of-play of the research on the digitalisation of career guidance tools and services. LLLP conducted the focus group with counsellors from different career guidance centres of the International network of Cités des métiers, which is a member of LLLP. The expert interviewed was a policy analyst from an international organisation (OECD) who has expertise on the use of digital technologies in educational and career guidance for young people.
The analysis of counsellors’ needs
In LLLP focus group, many counsellors had a specific context and target groups as they worked with individuals with low basic skills (literacy, language and digital skills) which hampered their use of digital tools for career counselling. Still many people need support and guidance to use them and cannot do it in full autonomy.
The focus group questions revolved around existing use of IT tools by the counsellors and the clients, potential barriers of use, experience with competence cards or other methods for the identification of competences, and questions about work setting and possibilities for using the tool.
Counsellors said that they use different IT tools (for sharing or finding Information on jobs and training) but none mentioned the use of competence cards. Counsellors said it is useful if clients can also use the cards autonomously or as “homework”. It did not come as a surprise that young people are more eager to use digital versions of existing physical tools than older generations. An important added value of a digital version of competence cards is that it can be a solution for distant career counselling when people don’t have easy access to the centres. However, it was stressed multiple times that digital skills and literacy can be a barrier.
What is the state-of-play of the digitalisation of tools for career guidance?
During the expert interview, we discussed the use of digital technologies in career guidance, the risks and opportunities for using them as well as the status of the research and key success factors for using digital tools in career guidance. The OECD is conducting research on tools in the Observatory on Digital technologies in Career guidance for Youth (ODiCY).
Digital technologies have been emerging for decades (e.g. online questionnaires, use of computers to access labour market information) but it varies greatly from one country to another and from one organisation to another. The expert mentioned the importance of the issues of equity and access. A trend was observed in a few European countries where marketisation of the tools and the fact they are not free limits their use in large. Some countries are trying to work against this by funding public tools. Although it can be beneficial for remote users it can also contribute to increased gaps in terms of access because of digital literacy levels.
It is important to involve counsellors in the tool design and testing and it can support building trust and increase chances it will be used “a lot of research we’ve done says that if you don’t involve career counsellors then it is not going to work” said the expert. We shouldn’t either accept or reject a digital practice solely because “it is digital”. The question is rather “is it needed?”. Besides, the importance of building the capacity of counsellors for using tools like Digicards was discussed. To this date, there is increasing research that aims to map and describe digital tools in career guidance but little on the impact or quality of the tools.
Next steps
We took all the ideas and suggestions into account for the design of the tool. The launch will be open in August for the pilot testing phase.
Interested in knowing more about the project?
For more information, look at the official website, read the our project page or follow us on our social media channels!
DigiCards is a project co-financed by the European Union within the framework of Erasmus+.
Lead coordinator: KARBON Consulting GmbH (Austria)
Partner: Lifelong Learning Platform (Belgium)
Project period: 01.01.2024 – 31.12.2024
Project number: 2023-2-AT01-KA210-VET-0001758544
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