About this website

This web site is designed to provide leading-edge ideas for careers work – including information-advice-and-guidance, careers education, career counselling, mentoring, coaching, personal-and-social development, learning for well-being, for a changing world, portfolio development and individual action-planning.

In particular it focuses on the use of technology for careers information, advice and guidance. Technology has already influenced, and will continue to influence, not only the ways in which guidance services are accessed by clients, but how they are used by them.

At the heart of developments in technology is the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Characterised by blogs, wikis, tagging and social bookmarking, multimedia sharing, audio blogging, podcasting and RSS feeds, Web 2.0 has changed the way people interact and has profound implications, potentially, for the delivery of guidance. However, it has barely begun to impact on the way guidance services are delivered by different careers services. With the next generation technology (Web 3.0) already on the horizon, the need to begin to align new technologies with service delivery is becoming more urgent.

This web site not only provides access to research, ideas and discussion around the use of such technologies, but provides examples of newly developed software and applications along with discussion of how they might be used. Our aim is to bridge the gaps between researchers, software developers and practitioners. However the resources may be of interest to broader groups of people including all those interested in new ideas on how to make careers work more useful and effective – education and guidance professionals, volunteers, their families, communities and employers, politicos and their advisers.

The development of the site has been supported with funding from European projects, including the Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Learning project G8WAY project on careers and transitions and the European Research Framework Mature-IP project.