Challenges Addressed
- Blended counselling
- Exchange and knowledge transfer (among educational professionals, guidance counsellors, etc.)
- Facilitation of transition from school education to career selection
- Improve matching between skills and jobs
- Improvement of guidance/ employment services
- Increase the interaction between schools and professional life
- Increase the mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Promote self-assessment
- Provision of low-threshold information on educational guidance to disadvantaged adult populations
- Raise awareness on guidance
- Reduce early school leaving
- Support those wishing to re-enter the labour market
- Tackling unemployment
- Target unemployment
Professions in Picture provide students with updated information on the labour market and on professions in the Netherlands.
More than 480 professions are presented with descriptions, texts and videos, while there is information about training, internships and job opportunities for each occupation.
The website is linked with two pages supporting the transition from school to training.
Policy objectives
- Access to Lifelong Guidance Services
- Assessing the effectiveness of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Assuring the quality of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Career Management Skills
- Contributing the rise of mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Funding Lifelong Guidance Services
- ICT in Lifelong Guidance
- Improving careers information
- Improving employability and supporting older workers
- Interactive online tools
- Raising the skills and qualifications of adults
- Raising the skills and qualifications of young people
- Strategic Leadership
- Supporting people at risk and disadvantaged groups
- Training and Qualifications of Guidance Practitioners
INNOVATIVE ASPECTS OF LMI
- Blended counselling
- Creation of ePortfolios with students' skills and competences
- Crowed sourcing of expert knowledge on educational guidance
- Customisation of LMI through the users' adaptation according to their needs
- Data entered by end-users
- Effective job matching
- Guidance methods
- Informal LMI
- Innovative user profiling
- Interoperability with job-search engines
- Life course related filtering of LMI
- Matching of regional education to labour market
- News relevant to educational guidance
- Occupational information
- One-stop-shop
- Personalised educational advice
- Provision of additional information on the awards not available elsewhere, to make it easily understood to employers and institutions in other countries
- Provision of external links to available EC employment, guidance and educational services
- Real time LMI
- Scientific research on guidance
- Thematic compilation of third party LMI
Types of labour market information provided involve:
- Information on professions and required education level – or link to the ‘MBO City’ website (list of schools offering training for a particular profession);
- Tests of profession's suitability to the user;
- Map of job and internship opportunities across Netherlands.
The main providers of labour market information are research institutes, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), UWV and SBB. SBB has also created an extra website especially for teachers with lesson material, assignments and links.
INNOVATIVE USE OF ICT
- Combination with offline elements
- Connection with third parties (LMI, PES, etc.)
- Customized RSS feed
- Dynamic interconnection of electronic resources according to a life course approach
- e-portfolio
- Interactive online tools
- Mobile app
- Online counselling
- Online wiki
- Open source
- Personalised information storage
- Quick diagnosis tool
- Social media utilisation
- SBB has a contract with an external IT company that hosts and maintains the website;
- The update and quality assurance of data is secured by agreements made with the data suppliers;
- Users can share information in Facebook and Twitter;
- Within the framework of the project ‘Boris helps you into work’, a project that focuses on employment of young people with special needs, there is also lesson material and assignments for VSO and practice education.
Results and impacts obtained
In numbers, during the first quarter of 2015, 127 000 unique visitors visited the sites, and amongst them 25% are repeat visitors.
There is no information available on qualitative results such as the impact on career choices or skills of the website-users, as the page is not monitoring such developments in any way.
Evaluation process: SBB gets mostly feedback from study advisers and teachers, who express their opinion regarding the use of the website in several ways by either contacting SBB directly via e-mail or sharing their views in SBB events. Students can provide feedback also via their ‘contact button’.
- Reliable, qualitative, up-to-date and independent information;
- LMI sources are validated;
- National and regional information offered is accurate, detailed, mostly with a forward-thinking perspective;
- Extra safety for the quality of the information, thanks to the validity of SBB;
- Close collaboration with user groups;
- Separate lesson material for teachers who teach young people with special needs;
- Relatively low budget.
- Different methodology to provide information by each of the 17 centres of expertise.
- Difficulty in the interaction with the users of the website.
- Occupation movies presented in the website are old-fashioned and do not appeal to today’s students.
- Results of matching tests are sometimes unclear or may include contradictory statements.
- Need for more information on application issues and for the creation of a central website.
Transferability elements
In 2010, SBB started within a project to create job descriptions, to identify and categorise skills, competences and occupations in a more standardised way -in accordance to the ESCO classification-. The results led to the creation of a new website by the Dutch Ministry of Education aiming at embedding the results in a digital platform and make them available to students.
The website was developed and funded as part of a project, while additional funding came from SBB. The budget for 2016-2017 came from LOB subsidy (EUR 50 000) and from SBB: (EUR 50 000).
Since 2015, the budget has been reduced up to 50%, as the website is now fully developed.
Two employees of SBB are managing the project and have a background in sociology, statistics and IT. They need to demonstrate coordination, translation and analytical skills and also have good writing skills and be able to focus on the important information and summarise it. They need to have a good knowledge of the Dutch education system, and of the developments of the Dutch labour market.
- The content of the page is public and worldwide accessible;
- It has an independent character and features no advertisements;
- Most of the material dedicated to teachers is downloadable in pdf form;
- Teachers are free to use whatever suits them best.
Stakeholders from the education and business sector are part of the general management and/or the executive committee of SBB. SBB is constantly looking for ways to satisfy both employers and schools.
- New services will be gradually introduced; a mix of online services and personal contact;
- Positioning products and services;
- Strengthening of cooperation between education and business at national, sectoral and regional level;
- Creation of a new website with the involvement of parents, students and teachers.