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
The Service aims to increase the number of people in employment, improve skills levels and make a difference to people’s lives, helping individuals, communities and businesses to succeed. Services associated with the National Careers Service include: 
- The digital service, including the website, online careers tools, Lifelong Learning Account, job profiles, webchat and social media;
- Area based services: confidential and impartial advice, supported by qualified careers advisers in local centres;
- Local labour market information and brokerage services for schools, employers, HE/FE institutions and other intermediary organisations.
The National Careers Service (particularly area-based services) is slanted towards the users with the greatest need, which very often means that their ability to choose their own career is less than other groups. Besides progression into employment and learning, a main focus of the service is empowerment of users and identifying the transferable skills that can help to consider new options.
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
Each National Careers Service contractor is responsible for bringing all their regional/local LMI together for public access. The localised LMI is informed by various sources, such as Local Enterprise Partnership labour market reports, local LMI networks, local businesses and industry. It is accessed by career advisers online through a monthly bulletin and reports. 
The digital service aimed at the public uses LMI quite differently, it is informed by various data sources such as the National audit office, the Office for National Statistics. The LMI includes data on job profiles, qualifications etc which feeds into a set of user-friendly tools (as detailed below)
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
- Comprehensive online portal offering supportive tools;
- Upon free registration, results and records from all tools can be permanently stored in a Lifelong Learning Account;
- Course search tool for exploring an extensive course database ranging from Apprenticeships to flexible learning courses;
- Dedicated funding advice section;
- Skills Health Check Tool;
- Online quizzes;
- Action Plan Tool;
- Job profile database currently containing 800 files;
- Advice from trained counsellors is available via web chat and e-mail.
Results and impacts obtained
Evaluation process: All contractors are obliged to support SFA requests to participate in customer satisfaction and progression surveys and other research and evaluation programmes. The ‘payment by results’ funding model means that contractors are required to capture information about each client at three specific stages in order to receive payment – these are upon completion of a ‘Customer Satisfaction Survey’ and Action Plan (after the first session), upon completing the Action Plan, and upon progression into work and learning (for at least 3 months). This data informs the SFA’s Satisfaction and Progression Survey, which in 2014 reported the following national figures for the unique services:
- Face-to-face 5,592
- Telephone 3,203
- Online 9,476
Of the above-mentioned sessions, 50% of the clients had progressed in employment (significantly higher than the 46% in Year 2), through changing jobs / getting a job (32%, up from 29% in Year 2), taking up voluntary work (19%), changing career (16%) or achieving a pay rise or promotion (11%). Face-to-face and telephone advice customers were more likely to have achieved employment progression (51% and 50%) than telephone information customers (45%).
The National Careers Service is considered a success on many levels. Following to the publication of the National Careers Service Satisfaction and Progression Surveys Annual Report, Joe Billington, the Director of the National Careers Service, said that 'the results of the survey are truly remarkable and emphasise the value that the National Careers Service adds to people's lives and careers'. The online tools in particular, the Skills Health Check, the CV Builder and the Job Profiles, are well respected by careers professionals nationally and internationally. Contractors are encouraged to promote positive case studies to inspire potential users and celebrate success, encouraging potential clients to use the service.
- Political changes - the service should be agile enough to respond to changes effectively
- Increased digitalisation of the service in terms of adviser skills and maintenance of websites.
- Payment by results funding model – results are difficult to evidence.
Transferability elements
When the National Careers Service was launched in 2012, the national unemployment rate averaged around 8%. The (then) Skills Minister John Hayes said: “With competition for jobs fiercer than ever, now is the time to introduce a careers service that will deliver on its promise…Making available the right advice at the right time and in the right places is to strike a blow for social mobility, social cohesion and social justice - a society that encourages people from wherever they start to journey to the destination of their dreams”Since its launch the National Careers Service is delivered in accordance with contractual guidelines and priorities set out by BIS (Business Innovation and Skills) in its annual letter to the SFA (Skills Funding Agency).
The Service is not a profit-making contract; most contractors tend to break even with funding only just covering the costs. Main costs for prime contractors tend to be associated with staff costs, ‘ancillary costs’ such as marketing, phone service and premises.
National Careers Service centres employ a range of staff, from qualified professional career advisers and coaches to administrators, marketing staff and managers. Advisers must have a Level 4 Diploma in Career Information and Advice and a Level 6 Diploma in Career Guidance and Development.
- A single contractor runs the website and the web chat facility and takes basic phone calls from a national 0800 number;
- Fixed terminals and laptops are in place for advisors to record information about clients, and customers have access to computers in public areas;
- Contracted organisations must ensure that data is captured through a robust Data Management System developed according to the contractual guidelines of the Service;
- Employees must ensure that all systems used to access, process, transmit or store personal data are implemented in accordance with the contract and conform to government guidelines on security.
- The Service supports many different types of customer, using a variety of different delivery methods (face-to-face, telephone, online) to respond to varying needs;
- Qualified career professionals use their professional judgement on appropriate methods and tools for integrating LMI into their delivery.
- Clearer focus toward supporting specific priority groups and less face-to-face activity for customers who should be signposted to the website and telephone service;
- Continuation of the greater focus on the role of employers involved in career guidance and education.