Crucial Impacts on Career Choices

The project  Crucial Impacts on Career Choices is established as a follow up of the Erasmus+ project called Diversity in Career counselling, which took place in 2015 - 2017.
It addresses challenging issues of career guidance professionals working with young people in ever changing globalised Europe of the 21st century such as low number of these people who receive proper career services when making career choices. Consequently those choices are made on the basis of stereotypes, role models, media and social situation, and not by their actual values and competencies.

The project aims at developing strategies and tools for career practitioners working with young people that can be applied across Europe. Therefore our project brings together practitioners from different contexts and different countries.  

Objectives:
- Carry out an action research to analyse factors that influence career choices of students on primary and secondary schools.
- Develop viable strategies for career practitioners to deal with those factors.
- Create tools for career practitioners, which will enable them to develop CMS and transferable competencies and incorporate them into their daily work.
- Promote tools for critical reflection, which will allow career practitioners to challenge their practice and assess whether they are reproducing current gender, social, ethnical stereotypes.
- Promote and disseminate above mentioned innovative career tools and approaches across the EU.

This will be achieved via partnership between five different institutions from five European countries (Czech Republic, UK, Denmark, Spain and Greece), each of them having a different background and expertise in career counselling.  The partners are:
- EKS (Czech Republic)
- The University of Derby (UK)
- VIA University College (Denmark)
- The University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
- Sivitanidios Public School of Trades and Vocations (Greece)

The project starts on the 1st of September 2018 and finishes on the 31st of August 2021. Following activities will be carried out within its three years’ course:  
- 6 transnational meetings consisting of local visits/mutual learning/work on the research and handbook (each partner will hold one such meeting).
- Carrying out a research.
- Creating a handbook for career practitioners, containing both tools for working with their clients.
- Dissemination of projects outputs and organising dissemination seminars in each country.

The key outcomes of the project are a research and a handbook for career practitioners. The research will be carried out in all partner countries. Our aim is to explore all the elements that are influencing career choices of students in primary and secondary schools, together with recommendations for practitioners how to deal with those challenges. Research results and recommendations will be published online in English and it will be translated into Czech, and widely distributed. The handbook will collect innovative and good practice for career practitioners working on primary and secondary schools, created and collected throughout the project. It will again contribute to better management of carrier decision process of young people. It will be written in English and translated into Czech, Danish, Spanish and Greek. It will be published online and also printed in English and Czech.

Dissemination - the key events are seminars with approximately 40 participants in each country. The audience will be specific in each country, depending on the profile of each partner. Participants will have an opportunity not only to learn about research results and to receive the handbook, but also to participate in training workshops and debates on project outcomes.