WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
WP4: Working Group
Research Activities
Thierry Nabeth
INSEAD
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Overview
Description, objectives, …
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Objectives
• Role of the working groups: To establish the link
between theory and practice
• The outcomes of the collaborative work of the
working groups of the network will be transferred
outside (via the CG report, CG portal,
Magazines, other?).
• Outputs of WP4:
• Annual workshops
• CareerGUIDE for Schools Magazines (Oct 06 / Oct 07 / Sep
08)
• Working group reports (Mar 07 – Sep 08)
• Report on Effective Career Guidance (publication: Sep 08)
• Content to be used to populate the CG portal?
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Activities
• The organization of the working groups and the schools
connected with the network in each participating country
• The determination of the research activities of the
working groups,
• The implementation of scheduled meetings of the
thematic working groups,
• The implementation of annual CareerGuide for Schools
workshops where members of all the working groups
meet, share and spread research evidence, and the
conduction of the research
• The development of the Report on Effective Career
Guidance in schools
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Current Situation
What we have achieved until now
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
4 Groups have been setup
• 4 groups have been formed
• WG 1. School to Labour Transition
• WG 2. Methodologies and approaches (including
ICT) in career guidance
• WG 3. Attitudes, perception of students/teachers
towards CG
• WG 4. Career design skills Their activities have
been defined
– And their scopes & activities have been
defined
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
The work of the Groups has started
• The collection of resources related to CG have
well advanced (in the Wiki)
– For WG1 and WG2. (what about WG3 & WG4?)
• Organisation of “virtual meeting” (via MSN)
– Any feedback on this? (are they productive? Should
we modify them?)
• Any other action to report?
• Any other remark? (have we overlooked some
activities, are we producing something valuable?
Are our objectives realistic? Are the groups well
integrated –not isolated- with the rest of the
work)
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
A Wiki has been setup
• Role of this Wiki: Support the groups in
collaboratively assembling the content to be
“edited” by WP4, via:
– Collection of Career related resources (paper
references, url, etc.)
– Collection of Career related definitions
– Collection of Career related examples & scenarios
– Contribution to the share understanding (agreement
on the definitions)
– The contribution to creation of an dynamic of
knowledge exchange (sense of community )
– Collaborative authoring of the CareerGuide report
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
The Wiki
• Role of this Wiki is also: To facilitate the
exploitation / dissemination of the content
“produced*” by the group:
– Facilitate the transfer to the Career Guide
portal. (since the content is already formatted
for a web visualisation)
Notes:
• The Relationship of the Wiki with other collaborative
infrastructure is to be defined (should be complementarity)
• * The objective of the project is not really to produce content
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
The Wiki now
• The Wiki until now has been used to:
– Help to clarify the structure of the work. The details of the
activities are available in the Wiki
– To collect references (mainly url, but also paper references)
• But this is just a starting point
– (we could imagine even that it would become the reference Wiki
of Career guidance on the Internet)
– In any case, it can help use to reduce the email flooding, to
support the collaborative editing of documents (MS word
reviewing mechanism do not allow two persons working on a
document “at the same time”) and the building of a share
understanding (and knowing about others).
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Next steps
Planning for the future
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
What we have to do
• Consolidate the work that has been completed
(collection of resources). Have we overlooked
something? How do we present it?
• Identify, and define the key terms & concepts that are
relevant to Career Guidance. Example: skills, CVs, CV
writing tools, etc.
• Identify existing materials that an feed into CG (after reprocessing). More should be done here since little effort,
big payoff!
• Collect additional and very comprehensible content
(such as short examples, cases, stories & scenarios)
• Present synthetically a few key career guidance
processes. (for instance: finding an internship, applying
to a company, …)
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
What we have to do (2)
• This will have to be done in coordination with the
individual group leaders (and in particular
structure the Wiki so that it can support these
activities).
• Clarify how we coordinate with the other
activities and work (we have to begin to thing
how to coordinate / align the work of the WG)
such as:
– Define how to transfer the content to the portal: The
result of WP4 will provide content of the Portal. (we
have to begin to thing how to coordinate / align the
work of the WG & portal)
– What about the magazine?
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
CareerGUIDE for Schools
Magazines
• We still have the time
– Oct 06 / Oct 07 / Sep 08
• However:
– We should already begin to form some ideas
about the magazine such as:
• Form (web diffusion?, size?, layout)
• Audience (educators, students)
• Content (events, articles?, portrait of
organisations?)
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Reports on Effective
Career Guidance
• We still have the time
– Working group reports (Mar 07 – Sep 08)
– Report on Effective Career Guidance (publication:
Sep 08)
• However:
– We should already organise the work of the
workgroup so that what they produce will naturally
flow into the reports (with a minimum of effort).
– Maybe, we could even imagine that the report will just
be an extraction of the Wiki, (the Wiki will have been
properly structured for this).
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Reports on Effective
Career Guidance
• The content originate from
• bibliographical & url reference work
• From reformated (existing) materials & expertise of different
partners
• Original work, such as concept definition, process description
(this has to be minimised, since we do not have infinite
resources to produce content!)
• The content will include:
• Definition of the most important concepts
• Description of the most important processes presented in a
comprehensive way.
• Presentation of scenario and examples illustrating in a
comprehensive way the issues and the processes.
• Organised and annotated references related to Career
Guidance (url + paper references)
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Open questions
• The organization of the working groups
and the schools connected with the
network in each participating country
– How to connect to the Schools? Do we need
to have specific action (for the partners that
already have these connection), and for
instance involve them in coming later to the
portal (or participate to the Wiki?)
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Main Challenges
Leveraging the Network of expertise
we have in the CareerGuide.
Stimulating particuipation
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Effectiveness
• Best use of resource and relevance
– How to make the best use of people and
organisation’s expertise. People contribution should
leverage their existing competencies, and existing
materials. Why to reinvent the wheel when the
material already exist? The criteria that should apply
is the value of what is produced, to the effort to
produce it. Maybe an inventory of what people
already have could be useful.
• Setting priorities
– Some activities (resource collection, surveys) are very
time consuming (in particular for some partners).
They have to be produce, but we have to clearly
define the limits.
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006
WP4: WG RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Participation & motivation
• Motivating a distributed group is difficult
– Many work on stimulating people participation exist (social
loafing, …).
– Participation in an open / distributed network is even more
difficult
• Solutions:
– Imposing processes is not a sustainable solution by itself (it can
help however)
– People have to be motivated, and therefore: The individual
contribution should be identifiable, relevant, doable.
– We should also understand the real reason of little participation
(not enough expertise? Not enough interest? Not enough
resource or time), and reorient it if necessary.
CareerGuide 2nd General Meeting,
Dresden, 30-31 March 2006