The CAREERS AROUND ME PROJECT: Smart technologies for improving career management skills

The CAREERS AROUND ME PROJECT: Smart technologies for improving career management skills

While the world is changing at a rapid pace, citizen’s ability to handle complexity and to manage their own career development become crucial.

The need to develop the set of skills which empower citizens to master their career-related challenges has therefore rightly gained priority in European lifelong guidance policies. These skills are defined as “career management skills” and are the focus of a new policy reform project funded by the Erasmus+ programme.

The project is called “CAREERS AROUND ME” and involves a wide Consortium of partners who work in all stages of the individual’s career development (schools, higher education, vocational education and public employment centres).

The collaborative effort foreseen in this project aims to promote a better understanding of CMS, support the educational component of CMS development and explore the use of innovative technologies to support CMS development. 

This will be achieved by developing a common CMS methodological and pedagogical framework, a set of tools for effective intervention for different target groups of beneficiaries, for gathering evidence, improving processes and quality of service as such, and involving online technology to achieve high availability of this service.

While hoping to trigger an impactful systemic change, partners started a European social innovation experiment which plans to engage a wide network of stakeholders in an international participatory action research.

The project main outputs will be:

1) A proposal for a new common CMS framework and CMS catalogue

The international research team is collecting, analyzing and researching examples of CMS frameworks and preparing a proposal for a new common CMS framework and CMS digital catalogue. This will represent the methodological basis for developing and testing a new web platform as a source and tool for guiding career education activities. Each skill will be mapped to different levels of expertise and defined for different targets. Once completed, the CMS catalogue will become a freely available reference point for career guidance providers and other stakeholders in project partner countries.

2) A comprehensive platform to promote the development of CMS

Based on the catalogue, the team will then collect existing career learning online activities and develop innovative ones via national collaborative workshops. The learning units and training tools will be the core of a new web-based platform which will aim to support practitioners and clients in the process of developing CMS. The platform and the tools will be tested in national pilots in Italy, Germany, Romania, Spain, Austria and Czech Republic. Pilots will involve different target groups like students, NEETs, the unemployed, low-skilled adults, disadvantaged people, etc.

While hoping to be able to contribute significantly to this great societal challenge, the CAREERS AROUND ME consortium invites to visit the website www.careersproject.eu and to subscribe to the project newsletter which will share the updates, the opportunities and the tools offered by the project.

International project partnership

• Italy – University of Camerino, Centro studi Pluriversum Srl, Citynet Srl

• Germany - Hochschule der Bundesagentur fuer Arbeit

• Spain - Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

• Czech Republic – Guidance Services Support Unit of the National Training Fund

• Austria - Österreichisches Institut für Bildungsforschung der Wirtschaft

• Romania - Bucharest Municipal Resource Center and Education Assistant