Online Career Counselling Academy

The pandemic had a massive impact on counselling in career guidance, on the respective institutions as well as on counsellors & counselees across Europe. They were forced to convert their mostly f...

Our objectives corresponded with the Digital Education Action Plan & we started with the self-assessment grid, which provided educational & vocational counsellors as well as institutions with an easy-to-use & practical tool to assess their digital competences for their counselling activity. With the Hybrid Flexi Course, we provided the primary target group a customized training to strengthen their digital skills according to their professional work as counsellors. Our counselling tool combined the necessary areas (communication, information, work tools, counselling tools) of career guidance to be able to offer them in the online setting in a high-quality, data-safe & professional way on one digital platform. This not only makes counselling more efficient, but also enables much better cooperation with clients. With the strategy handbook, institutions were provided with practice-related material to integrate knowledge transfer into their organisation & to anchor digitalization strategically at all their levels. Our European approach was promoted by our policy recommendation, which allowed a European common & transferable understanding within the vocational education of career counsellors.

With its multi-level approach, we started with a self-assessment grid targeting at least 300 people, but we managed to involve 440 counsellors. The results delivered a finetuned picture of counsellor’s digital skills. Together with the focus groups with a total of 39 people involved a report for the needs anaysis was compiled. The results served as the basis for the development of the Hybrid Flexi Course. The piloting of the course was targeted with 120 people, but till the end of the project 370 participants from all over Europe have attented the course. The Counselling Tool was programmed based on the needs of the professional work of career counsellors and was tested with 44 counselling session in all project countries. With the creation of the strategy handbook, national focus groups were implemented and discussed with 42 VET managers and decisions makers. Regarding the OCCAY policy recommendation, a round table in Brussels was organized with 10 experts & a webinar was held with 17 participants. In total, 7 national multiplier events with 183 participants in total were implemented in the project contries, 1 transnational training was held with 7 participants & we presented OCCAY on several conferences i.ex. Euroguidance.

All results of OCCAY went clearly beyond awareness raising interventions because the project addresses the core problems of digital readiness & developed tailored solutions. With our OCCAY products (self-assessment grid, hybrid flexi course & the all-in-one counselling tool), we strengthened the digital literacy among career counsellors significantly & provided tools for online career guidance to institutions. The OCCAY strategy handbook served decision-makers & managers of VET institutions a practical approach to strategically integrate digitization in their organization in all levels by providing them a customized OCCAY framework and checklist on an institutional level. For experts & policy makers on national & European level we offered with our OCCAY policy recommendation valuable insights in the needs for a digital transformation to bring career guidance to the next level in Europe. In sum, our outputs contributed to reduce barriers to use digital technical applications & initiate a change in behaviour, to support institutions & to establish a safe digital working atmosphere. All products are available in all Bulgarian, English, German & Italian on the project website.