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.
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 face-to-face services to a digital setting quasi overnight. Unfortunately, online career guidance was not integrated in the range of services before the crisis. Reasons were manifold & the necessity of its application has considerably changed. It was time to structurally integrate the lessons learned from the time of the pandemic and take career guidance to the next level: an umbrella strategy to upskill digital skills on processes & tools is needed. Facing the variety of challenges, OCCAY attempted to be an inclusive & modular offer at the same time: It served VET institutions providing a tailor-made benchmark system to assess the digital literacy of their counsellors & integrating the digital literacy enhancement strategically within the quality management by a guideline recommendation for a national or even European harmonization. It served the individual counsellor by offering with the Hybrid Course a demand-orientated tool & with the OCCAY Platform for Online Career Guidance an innovative all-in-one counselling tool.