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
The ePortfolio is an online repository of experience, qualifications and competencies to be maintained and updated throughout a person’s educational/academic/professional course, and thus consists of the following sections:
- Me: user's introductory page;
- Me and work: users enter their work experience and match it with one of the occupation descriptions;
- Me and training: users enter their training experience;
- Me over work: users enter their experiences outside formal employment and training;
- My skills: a summary report that includes different types of skills, based on the user's previous entries;
- My evidence: previous experience in work, training or other activities is matched with related evidence;
- Documents area/Downloads: users extract a pdf. file with their profile data in a structured form;
- Practitioner/Administrator: only for practitioners, with management tools, statistical information on users etc.
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
The LMI originates from a variety of sources, such as data collected by Bil.Co centres and public databases. The most regular third-party source of LMI, is ‘cliclavoro’, the public labour platform. The LMI material is structured according to the target groups addressed to; LMI from cliclavoro includes a list of professions, labour market statistics and job offerings. The CIOFS-FP website is another source of LMI information, as it provides studies and reports regarding labour market thematic areas such as mobility, skills surveys, etc.
LMI is regularly updated, as part of a documented process.
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
The practice is a combination of digital web-based application and a hands-on vocational guidance and orientation practice carried out at the Bil.Co centres.
The application is managed by an external IT company, also responsible for applying modifications and improvements.
The application connects to various external data sources for synchronisation of data, job matching and LMI integration; technical team had to establish customised methods of data synchronisation and integration.
Results and impacts obtained
In numbers, the practice currently hosts over 6 000 registered users and over 2 000 companies.
From qualitative perspective, users feel more confident about their skills and competencies and are able to perceive and chart a more knowledgeable course in life and work. Companies are able to view candidates’ qualifications, skills and competences in structured form, a characteristic which greatly supports decision making.
Evaluation process: After the completion of each course, an analytic Skills Dossier is provided to attendees to present qualification evidence on skills acquired during the course. CIOFS-FP Piedmont and Bil.Co maintain analytic statistics. Every attendee of a course and every ePortfolio user is required to fill a satisfaction questionnaire. Six months after the end of a course, users are contacted by the operators for a brief telephone interview to see the outcomes of the services.
- Facilitates the self-reflection and self-assessment of the users;
- Usability, simplicity and ease of use of the application;
- Strong focus on privacy and content validation procedure.
- Absence of a formal national list of professions.
Transferability elements
The economic crisis has rendered the significance of guidance practices, as they can become a tool for the increase of labour mobility and potential. Bil.Co centres were used as a model for the Piedmont public employment services and CIOFS-FP Piedmont maintains an excellent relationship and frequent communication with the City of Turin and public authorities.
The development cost for the application amounted to EUR 80 000 covering the design, technical implementation and testing; including the fee for the external technical team. The annual maintenance and support costs are estimated at EUR 20 000 per year.
All practitioners must complete an obligatory 30-hour training course on the ePortfolio.
- Does not make heavy use of ICT and does not require hardware implementations of a large scale;
- Does not require advanced IT literacy and can be successfully operated by novice users.
- Unique combination of hands-on training, guidance and counselling which promote self-assessment with a long-term character.
- Via continuous feedback from stakeholders where available, CIOFS-FP Piedmont adapts its strategy and practices in order to reflect the current labour market situation.
- Frequent improvement using feedback from practitioners and users;
- Merge ePortfolio and Bil.Co websites to produce a complete guidance and LMI platform;
- Introduction of a mobile version of the application to improve its accessibility and attractiveness, especially for younger users;
- Introduction of new features on operational and technical levels to target disabled users, such as immigrants;
- Intensification of resource allocation to promotional activities on different channels;
- Conduct formal presentations of the application and accompanying practice to public authorities, mainly public employment centres.