Building Today the Careers of Tomorrow

The project started from a mutually agreed upon idea, that is that the area of career orientation was either poorly and unevenly addressed in all participating countries and that teachers of different subject matters were unable to do much to aid the process through existing means, therefore leaving the decision in the hands of more or less present career orientation counselors, peer-pressure or over-protective parents. The project "Building Today the Careers of Tomorrow" or BTCT aimed to involve the participating schools in a series of activities that would ultimately lead to the production of sets of materials on career orientation and career building that have been and will further be made available to all interested parties, teachers, students, parents, stakeholders and others in order to aid the process of career decision making and support pupils in making a wise, determined, accurate and sustainable choice of career as well as build towards their goal while still in school. The project also aimed at refining linguistic skills of the participants that were directly involved by exposing them to the English language through questionnaires, tests and handouts that were to become worksheets, as integral part of the personal development portfolio. Digital learning and exposure to various 21CDLs was also accomplished as students were asked to design and apply questionnaires online, to produce graphical representations of results and to report on their actions. The project envisaged to produce 3 outputs, distinct and yet interconnected: a book on best practices of career orientation, career guidance and career building based on a thorough analysis of the strong and weak points of the methods used in every participating country as well as on the selection of best examples of methods, materials, questionnaires and other alike; a methodology/guidelines for a set of questionnaires and worksheets aimed to take both teachers and students through the maize of discovery of skills, talents, intelligence chart, innate abilities, interests and motivational factors that will contribute to bettering career orientation and alleviate decision making processes; this comes with sets of instructions upon application, assessment of results, conducting meetings based on them with students, parents and other, frequency of application, increase of degree of accuracy of determining content. Based on this, the third output has become the collector of data gathered by the use of the second, in the form of career orientation and career building portfolios, each accompanied by the guidelines. The project involved five partner schools from central and south east European countries, covering a span of student ages from 12 to 19, both lower and upper secondary, both vocational and theoretical, in such a way that the covered areas have become as comprehensive as possible for any other interested school or organization from any other area. All products are and will be available on-line, in final format or as building blocks in order to be used, viewed, assessed and commended upon by anyone interested as well as in order to aid the process of application of materials by any teacher, student or professional interested in the topic. Moreover, each output is available at every participating school's library, with their partners such as Teachers' Corpus Houses, Inspectorates and local universities, both in English and in the national language, as reference and usable material sine die. In order to determine professionals in education reconsider traditional ways and integrate collaborative techniques in their activity, at the same time involving their pupils as much as possible in taking their decisions concerning their educational needs, development, and future paths in life this project has taken a new approach, that of creating a viable instrument - the portfolio and the accompanying brochure - which enables self-assessment, encourages out-of-the-box and critical thinking, allows pupils to build self-images in order to boost their career potential and scholastic results. Therefore, we consider that this project has created an instrument meant to build self-sufficiency and self-determination in the area of career building by offering the necessary tools for personal development.