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.