Professor Jenny Bimrose, Professor Alan Brown and Dr Sally-Anne will be attending the IAEVG conference on Career Guidance and Development Practices around the World, in Cape Town, South Africa (19-21 October). Professor Jenny Bimrose will present with IER Associate Fellows, Professor Mark Watson and Dr Mary McMahon on ‘Paradoxes in the career transitions of older women’. Together with Professor Alan Brown, Jenny will be presenting on ‘Stories of career adaptability from England and Norway’. Dr Sally-Anne Barnes, with Jenny, will present on ‘Developing and integrating IT innovations in careers guidance in the UK’. Sally-Anne will also be showcasing some on the IT systems researched and developed for careers guidance organisations in the UK.

As part of an FP7 funded project, MATURE, Professor Alan Brown, Professor Jenny Bimrose and Dr Sally-Anne are organising a workshop on 29 September to demonstrate ICT systems to support careers practitioners. Since 2008, the Warwick Institute for Employment Research has been working with European colleagues developing demonstrator systems. Four systems will be demonstrated: the first has been designed to support practitioners with their use of labour market information (LMI) in careers practice; the second to support practitioners (and more broadly, employees across organisations) with their continuing professional development; the third to visualise LMI data; and finally, LMI learning and development modules.

For the second year running, IER in partnership with Connexions Kent & Medway won a National Careers Award for ‘research by an organisation’. The event was organised by the Institute of Careers Guidance (the largest professional careers organisation in the UK) and was held in Leeds. The award was in recognition of the innovative research and development carried out by IER and Connexion Kent on Career Constructor. Career Constructor was the result of a three year research project on the integration of ICT in career guidance practice. It brings together information on over 800 jobs and over 400 videos with interactive exercises, local searches and customised career research – all aimed at providing a comprehensive web-based career package for young people. Career Constructor was designed to enable young people to conduct detailed career searches, record their own research and profile in an e-portfolio format, explore labour market data and rate jobs.

The report commissioned by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills was written by Jenny Bimrose and Sally-Anne Barnes. It analyses the interaction, roles and potential of three topics: the use and availability of Labour Market Information; the type and extent of ICT usage in relation to careers choices; and the availability, quality and usage of careers Information, Advice and Guidance.  This will help inform future UK Commission recommendations on these topics.