Are you prepared for the challenges of the changing labour market? Do you want to better understand and apply skills related to emotional awareness, active listening, reflection, coaching skills, peer coaching and powerful questioning? Do you want to explore tools for handling labour market information (LMI) and the digital agenda? The 'Changing World of Work' MOCC (Massive Open Online Course) is a 6 week course with an estimated workload of 3.5 hours per week. The course has been developed as part of the EmployID project which has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 619619. IER and Associate staff involved in course delivery: Jenny Bimrose, Alan Brown, Rachel Mulvey, Deirdre Hughes and Graham Attwell. For more information register now.

As part of the Levering Workplace Innovation project funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences’ Impact Accelerator Account, Sally Wright organised a seminar for policymakers at the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It examined ways to improve the innovative capacity of firms. She was joined as a presenter at the seminar by Chris Warhurst and Bengt-Åke Lundvall of Aalborg University in Denmark. The seminar focused on encouraging a change in current thinking about what best levers innovation, highlighting that firms that combine two approaches – the current one based on science, technology and R&D, the other based on progressive ways to manage and organise employees at the workplace-level – have five times greater product innovation.

Dr Clare Lyonette is the UK expert on a new French project, funded by the ANR: 'Quel genre de managers avant 40 ans ? Faits et discours dans quatre pays européens'. She and the other team members met in Aix-en-Provence in February 2017 to discuss the research plans, based on an earlier 2015 meeting in Paris. Clare will be involved in work package 7: 'Articulation of personal and professional spheres'. The mixed-methods project involves quantitative data analysis of managerial roles and new semi-structured interviews with managers in 4 countries. The project is being coordinated by Vanessa di Paola (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, LEST, Car Céreq), Arnaud Dupray (Céreq, Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, LEST), Dominique Épiphane (Céreq) and Stéphanie Moullet (Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LEST, IRT, Car Céreq). For more information.

Professor Rachel Mulvey will be in Paris all this month, working at INETOP/CNAM - France's national institute for the study of work and career. Rachel is no stranger to CNAM, having taught in 2015 on the ECADOC summer school which brought together doctoral students from across the globe, all doing research on career. She returned last year as examiner on a PhD jury and is both honoured and delighted to be invited back, this time as visiting professor.

In addition to its research and scholarly work, the institute offers Masters programmes in both occupational and career psychology. Rachel will be running workshops on qualitative methods for these students who are now in their dissertation semester - and for doctoral candidates too. She is contributing to European research on 'decent work' led by Valérie Cohen-Scali and Jean-Luc Bernaud. This elaborates themes considered at the UNESCO conference on life design and decent work.Rachel will present findings from the two CEDEFOP studies to colleagues at the institute, showcasing the findings by the French country team (which she led) set in the context of the wider study undertaken with IER colleagues Jenny Bimrose, Alan Brown and Sally-Anne Barnes.

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.