Accurate, reliable and up-to-date labour market information (LMI) is acknowledged to be essential for successful individual career transitions for individuals making their way into, and through, the labour market. The LMI for All service has been under development at IER since 2012. Its usage across various established websites is testimony to its efficacy and usefulness. Interest in the portal is significant and growing.

The LMI for All database provides a reliable and up-to-date source of national data and careers labour market information. By using the LMI for All API (application programming interface), there is the potential to provide access to data relevant to all individuals at various stages of their learning and career journey for making career decisions. Find out more about the LMI for All service, who is using it and how to access at the next free webinar on 3 May. To register go to the project website.

Dr Deirdre Hughes OBE, Principal Research Fellow Warwick Institute for Employment Research

These are critical times for career guidance and counselling in education. The implementation of up-to-date guidance and counselling in education must not be seen as something separated from educational reform. There is a critical tension between progressive and regressive tendencies in both education and careers work. The case for reform requires careful attention leading to innovative solutions:

• How to combine critical thinking (‘how reliable and usefully do you know?’) and the development of career narrative?
• How to create a school culture in which emotions are not avoided but are seen as the starting point of significant learning? As significant learning presupposes pain (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), but too much pain will cause avoidance instead of learning.
• How can conflicting role demands be harmonized? Career teachers are confronted with two conflicting role demands (between ‘feedback’ and ‘feed-forward’) which demands that they have both a system orientation as well as a student-focused attitude. Teachers are confronted by conflicting demands with regards to qualities: on the one hand traditional demands that are defined primarily in output terms (e.g. less drop out) and on the other hand demands to be focused on the guidance process itself. A solution to this can probably not be found by setting out ‘empty’ (i.e. without theoretical underpinning) guidance roles (Network for Innovation in Career Guidance & Counselling in Europe, 2014)
• How to prevent the above mentioned problems from being ‘solved’ by outsourcing them? The persistent efforts by politicians to go towards marketisation of careers guidance have proven that this is a far from an imaginary tendency.
• How to create a strong career-learning environment? Schools are traditionally ‘turned inward’, but to create a career-learning environment cooperation between industry and schools on the basis of shared responsibility is required. Such cooperation is difficult to fully realise because it requires a taking leave of twentieth-century cooperation based on ‘divided’ responsibility. Such cooperation cannot be forced but it will also not happen without effort.

Together the articles in this International Symposium special issue encourage us to step back and think more about what constitutes effective twenty-first schooling. This also provides further stimuli to consider how and where can careers guidance and counselling policies, research and practice make a positive contribution to enriching individual’s lives.

Hughes, D. , Law, B. & Meijers, F. (2017) New school for the old school: careers guidance and counselling in education, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling.

LMI for All is an online data portal, which makes availble high quality, reliable labour market information (LMI) for the purpose of supporting and informing careers decisions. This data is freely available via an Application Programming Interface (API) for use in websites and applications. The development of this highly innovative resource has been underway since 2012 led by IER.

Find out more about LMI for All and the symposium.

The narrative study led by Professor Jenny Bimrose with colleagues from IER and partners in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy and Poland has been published by Cedefop who commissioned the research.

The report draws both on literature review and an original collection of stories from biographical interviews of individuals from seven European countries. The narrative accounts describe the wide variety of experiences with initial and further education. The analysis focuses on motivations for learning (or not) and the findings confirm that early negative experiences with schooling have a scarring effect inhibiting workers’ willingness to re-engage in education later in life. Nevertheless, many low-educated adults were found to command a variety of skills, which they have developed in the work context.

The ESRC Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Warwick, one of 21 such centres in the UK, embodies the university’s commitment to producing the next generation of leaders in social science research. Internationally renowned for its research excellence, the University of Warwick is now inviting applications for an ESRC-funded Collaborative PhD Studentship hosted at the Warwick Institute for Employment Research in association with our collaborative partner organisation Adviza. The PhD on the use of information communications technology (ICT) and labour market intelligence (LMI) in careers education and guidance will commence in October 2016. Find out how to apply by going to the IER website.