Project Description

Future-proof your Career aims to design, develop and implement a Future of Work Framework, focused on the identification -through a guidance process- of transversal skills which can be used to future-proof the careers of disadvantaged job seekers and enable sustainable future employment.

This forward thinking career guidance framework will provide a way of working for guidance practitioners which facilitates quality future focused career plans for job seekers already marginalised in the labour market, so as to ensure their inclusion in a technological and digitalised world of work.

It will support marginalised job seekers to understand and gain awareness of key competencies which are essential employability competences for a future labour market. These key competences underpin the ability to adapt and change to the demands of a technological workplace, and are important in up-skilling in initial and continuous vocational, educational and training.

The project has three main objectives:

1) to enable Individuals to become aware of their own skills for the future labour market particularly in relation to communication and interpersonal skills

2) to create awareness of future workplaces, their requirements, and associated VET progression routes

3) to create a culture of training and up-skilling of guidance practitioners in a fast changing labour market.

FYC is an innovative forward thinking project with five main intellectual outputs which will be carried out, in a collaborative way, by seven partners in six Countries. Project implementation is scheduled over 24 months.

The Intellectual Outputs are as follows:

IO1: FYC Framework Development Through a comprehensive research enquiry the partnership will design and develop a Future-proof Your Career Framework which will detail the core elements to be considered when guiding job seekers into the modern and future world of work, particularly for those who experience disadvantage in the labour market. It will focus on the non-cognitive, transferable skills required by future employees, many of which are developed informally and non-formally through work experiences, community and civic participation, lived experiences, education and training. The framework will detail and define the capabilities acquired through informal and non-formal learning and identify their significance in the future labour market at EU and national levels.

IO2: FYC Tool Specification and Content Development of an online tool which has the capacity to help workers, or job seekers who may never have worked, to identify skills and capabilities developed throughout their lives to date, to identify the underlying skills which were essential for previous jobs, or those developed through education and training, and link them to new jobs which will be developed in the ‘new world of work’. Many of these skills will be transversal soft skills, underlying aptitudes, interests, personality styles.

IO3: The FYC online platform: develop an online e-learning like platform which will have the capacity to host the FYC tool content as developed in IO2. Using a tool which was developed through a previous EU funded project INFORM, the partnership will assess and adapt the tool so that’s its usefulness now develops with the changing labour market and upgrade the tool so as to ensure it is usable with current technology. It will, through a series of interactive questions and animations, help the individual identify their human, social and psychological capital, and their connection to the current and longer-term labour market. It will identify areas where the individual could benefit from vocational or industry specific upskilling. It will provide the individual and their guidance practitioner with a report outlining existing capabilities and make suggestions as to how these could be built upon and utilised and thus enable the individual to prepare for a labour market which is driven by automation and digitalisation.

IO4: Future-proof Your Career - Training Modules for Practitioners Develop and test a training programme for practitioners, specifically, in the first instance, for those practitioners who are not working in the formal education system. Development of a training module for practitioners on the future of work, the types of jobs available, their make up in terms of hard and soft skills, and the career path options available to job seekers. This training module will aim to ensure that practitioners have both the contextual information on labour market restructuring and modernisation and on how to incorporate the new tool into their practice. It will provide practitioners with access to the most up-to-date thinking on the future labour market, and thus provide a step up for organisations with limited access to formal national structures. All training documentation will be available online so as to ensure training consistency across the partnership. It will also enable sustainability of the training where partners will have the ongoing facility to up-date information available for Part 1: The Context as they labour market continues to adapt and develop. In addition, a short Master Training will be available for partners to facilitate the training of practitioners in their own country.

IO5: Psychometric Evaluation This IO aims to establish the quality of the FYC tool in psychometric terms. The evaluation will establish levels of reliability and validity which are essential in demonstrating the quality and robust nature of the tool in terms of consistency and measurement. Pilot practitioners will use the tool with a minimum of 10 clients each, resulting in 20 participants from each partner country (as 2 practitioners will be trained) and 100 participants in total across the partnership. A short questionnaire will be designed to capture participant’s experiences of using the tool and practitioner’s experiences of administering the tool and accessing the results. Data will be sent to a subcontracted statistician who will use a statistical package such as IBM SPSS or Strata to carry out an analysis of the data.