Since many years, the debate concerning the need to maximize the benefit that digital innovation could bring to every stage of career guidance holds a central role in the discussion over the future of employment services. Already back in 2001, the OECD outlined how “information and communication technologies [were] transforming career information and guidance services”, increasing their interactive and accessible nature (Watts, 2001). Twenty years later, despite the pervasiveness of digital tools and technologies in everyday life, the general perception is that still a lot of work to be done to guarantee full access to digital career guidance at European level, overcoming disparities between countries and favouring the diffusion of the many good practices that are taking place at local/regional/national level.
Many debates have tried to understand which strategies could favor the full exploitation of potentialities that still haven’t completely expressed themselves. In a certain sense, there is the need to conciliate between the willingness of maintaining continuity with tradition, preserving the importance of the human contact between the user and the employment counsellor, and the desire of exploring the opportunities that digital devices could bring to life, as a mean for extending the outreach of the aforementioned relation.
Despite this dialectic between progressivism and traditionalism, today a number of facts seem to outline how new strategies and ways of thinking need to be developed, in order to respond to challenges that modern guidance is facing and cannot be denied or overlooked.
The existing tension between tradition and innovation should not turn the discussion on the future of career counselling into a contentious subject, diverting attention from the positive impact that could be guaranteed by an integration of digital opportunities into traditional career guidance. MOTIV-ACTION holds this exact objective: indicating a series of good practices and positive examples that could:
- Inspire operators in career guidance to include digital technologies in their daily practices, enhancing their ICT competences, increasing their ability to use multi-channeling approaches while personalizing the guidance process;
- Support adult users in understanding how to become more autonomous in the job search process, thanks to a more conscious and self-aware use of digital technologies.
Having these objectives, we will design a pathway and a series of instruments that will allow us to guide, train and support both unemployed users and career counsellors/adult educators in creating a link between technologies and career navigation and guidance activities. The challenge is to select the best scenarios, in which career operators have been able to design a positive learning process with the support of digital technologies, identifying and exporting the most interesting ideas and practices and trying to turn them into didactic materials that could stimulate further reflection on how to export them in all partner countries.