Challenges Addressed
- Blended counselling
- Exchange and knowledge transfer (among educational professionals, guidance counsellors, etc.)
- Facilitation of transition from school education to career selection
- Improve matching between skills and jobs
- Improvement of guidance/ employment services
- Increase the interaction between schools and professional life
- Increase the mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Promote self-assessment
- Provision of low-threshold information on educational guidance to disadvantaged adult populations
- Raise awareness on guidance
- Reduce early school leaving
- Support those wishing to re-enter the labour market
- Tackling unemployment
- Target unemployment
Education info mainly aims to empower students to make informed decisions regarding their transition from one education level to another, while also having in mind the career prospects of their choices.
Education info can be used either independently by the students or with the assistance of an educational guidance practitioner.
Practitioners use the website during their guidance sessions and working hours at schools or through career guidance counselling outside the school environment.
Policy objectives
- Access to Lifelong Guidance Services
- Assessing the effectiveness of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Assuring the quality of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Career Management Skills
- Contributing the rise of mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Funding Lifelong Guidance Services
- ICT in Lifelong Guidance
- Improving careers information
- Improving employability and supporting older workers
- Interactive online tools
- Raising the skills and qualifications of adults
- Raising the skills and qualifications of young people
- Strategic Leadership
- Supporting people at risk and disadvantaged groups
- Training and Qualifications of Guidance Practitioners
INNOVATIVE ASPECTS OF LMI
- Blended counselling
- Creation of ePortfolios with students' skills and competences
- Crowed sourcing of expert knowledge on educational guidance
- Customisation of LMI through the users' adaptation according to their needs
- Data entered by end-users
- Effective job matching
- Guidance methods
- Informal LMI
- Innovative user profiling
- Interoperability with job-search engines
- Life course related filtering of LMI
- Matching of regional education to labour market
- News relevant to educational guidance
- Occupational information
- One-stop-shop
- Personalised educational advice
- Provision of additional information on the awards not available elsewhere, to make it easily understood to employers and institutions in other countries
- Provision of external links to available EC employment, guidance and educational services
- Real time LMI
- Scientific research on guidance
- Thematic compilation of third party LMI
LMI provided involves information about what students should consider when making a transition between educational levels or a transition to working life:
- Learning Opportunities provided by the educational agencies of the country, such as information on the entire school system, the different educational levels in Sweden, statistics that enable comparisons between schools, etc.
- Labour Market information, provided by the Swedish Public Employment Service, such as information about different professions and their linkages with Higher Education and with pre-university national programs; occupational profiles linked to the national vocational programs; labour market forecasts.
LMI is presented through different delivery means such as videos, graphs, pictures, voice reading.
INNOVATIVE USE OF ICT
- Combination with offline elements
- Connection with third parties (LMI, PES, etc.)
- Customized RSS feed
- Dynamic interconnection of electronic resources according to a life course approach
- e-portfolio
- Interactive online tools
- Mobile app
- Online counselling
- Online wiki
- Open source
- Personalised information storage
- Quick diagnosis tool
- Social media utilisation
- Data from different sources is collected in a standardized manner based on the EMIL national standard.
- Susa Hub is the central hub/database in the EMIL ecosystem that collects information about education opportunities and education providers from multiple sources. The various partners provide their data in an .xml format. These xml. files along with data that is collected internally is entered in the Susa Hub. EducationInfo.se gets these files from Susa Hub via http, processes it and stores it in a SOLR database. Data is being updated daily, while compulsory and upper secondary information is drawn from an in-house database.
- The website also fetches information on the labour market (forecasts and occupational descriptions) from an internal system using an Oracle Service Bus.
- Another important technical element of the practice is the open data policy that is being followed for data and information included.
Results and impacts obtained
In numbers, during October 2015 to October 2016, the page attracted almost 1 450 000 visitors.
Concerning qualitative results, the website presents a full spectrum of educational opportunities, which greatly supports students and can result to a better matching between education skills needed by the labour market. The platform actively supports the work of guidance practitioners. The operation of the website as a single access point of LMI on educational opportunities for students has positive implications to the entire national LLG system.
Evaluation process:
- evaluation by users and practitioners, via dedicated e-mail address,
- education guidance providers are contacted by the agency either through e-mail or at a larger scale by posting a request on the Facebook account of Swedish guidance practitioners.
- Many different stakeholders of the Swedish educational system have agreed to collaborate with NAE and offer their data;
- LMI on education opportunities is offered in a standardized and uniform way by following a specific national standard;
- Website offers educational guidance, while taking into account career prospects;
- Website is built on a guidance framework that uses CMS development as a bottom line;
- Excellent communication with guidance practitioners;
- Much of the content is provided in 18 languages;
- Website has a good level of user-friendliness and provides different means of delivering LMI;
- Government support and the fact that the Government commissioned it;
- ICT in education and guidance is promoted through the overall national context.
- Guidance practitioners were resistant to change, fearing a replacement of their role.
- The website is not actively promoted.
- Strong competition from private guidance practices and competing sites.
- Information might have to be simplified.
- Platform's CMS did not facilitate the easy integration of other websites or the translation of texts in many languages.
Transferability elements
- The practice has a high compatibility with the structure of the Swedish LLG system and enjoys political endorsement since its initial development was mandated by the Swedish government;
- The involvement of many educational institutions and guidance authorities in its implementation demonstrates its integration in the LLG system of Sweden;
- The use of the website within the school practices is promoted by the national authority responsible for this level of education.
- The annual budget and costs for the operation and maintenance of the practice is EUR 100 000.
- The overall budget for the initial development of the website was EUR 1 000 000, including costs for external consultants, infrastructure, software and personnel.
Three people are involved – part time – with the everyday operation and maintenance of the website; they hold an ICT background and have strong experience on educational issues. The legal department and educational experts validating the texts presented on the website also contribute. Around 1 900 people are employed as guidance counsellors in the Swedish school system; they are hired directly by the schools or centrally by each municipality. Practitioners follow a three-year university program that leads to a Bachelor of Education in Career Counselling.
- The technical infrastructure required is limited to simple requirements of a webpage: (i) a front and back end server; (ii) a database and (iii) a machine for extra services;
- The technical part for developing the specific apps is also quite simple;
- The structure of the webpage is simple, based on the Polopoly CMS;
- The user-friendliness of the website is quite high.
The LMI and the website's exercises can be used either individually or with the help of a school counsellor. As such, even though the use of the tools in both cases remains online, in the latter case it is combined with physical delivery methods within the school environment.
Many stakeholders of the educational system collaborate and offer data under a voluntary basis cooperation, a very important fact for the provision of an up to date and reliable overview.
- Migration of the various NAE web platforms into one;
- New version of the platform’s database containing an API that will facilitate cooperation with external authorities is being tested;
- Marketing efforts must be enhanced so as to raise awareness to students and schools;
- Need for higher involvement of schools in terms of providing them training on how to use the website;
- Need for actions towards the tool's adoption within the municipalities’ guidance practices;
- Need for more systematic mechanisms to facilitate the incorporation of practitioners’ feedback into the development of LMI;
- More resources are required in order for the website to better plan future developments.