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
Vi@s supports the self-management of citizens’ careers and the activities of guidance counsellors, for improving their face-to-face interventions with the more disadvantaged unemployed jobseekers. Users can access four different Vi@s, that match the four thematic pathways with different types of information and activities:
- Work Competencies: self-diagnosis of transferable skills required by employers and skill development by accessing online exercises and information;
- Vi@ exploration: self-knowledge and exploitation of occupations, active employment measures and education, training or job opportunities;
- Vi@ entrepreneurship: self-diagnosis of entrepreneur profile and potential development of entrepreneurial attitudes;
- Vi@ professional network: provides the knowledge and acquisition of job search techniques.
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
Due to the multimodal approach towards accession to LMI, Vi@s manages to collect historic labour market information on professions in Portugal, used for the elaboration of the various videos and other multimedia materials on the various occupations available in Portugal and also to collect real and up-to-date information on job vacancies in Portugal.
Vi@s obtains data and information on the labour market from a number of sources:
- National Statistics Service;
- IEFP;
- Local and regional LMI sources.
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
Vi@s offers a variety of interactive tools through its Multimedia Centre, such as online Guidance Programmes, Vocational Games, Electronic Publications and Videos.
“My Portfolio” section allows users to store their CVs and other certificates, which can be communicated via e-mail.
Vi@s obtains data and information on the labour market from a number of sources.
Results and impacts obtained
The number of visits in 2016 was 25 994, while the total number of registrations since May 2012 amounts to 46 532.
From a qualitative perspective, the design of the portal is evaluated as easy to use, while the majority of respondents stated that Vi@s assisted them to comprehend better their professional and academic options and assess their skills.
Evaluation process: from a user’s perspective, through satisfaction surveys as well as monitoring of the records and of the number of accesses to the portal, per user profile; from a management perspective, through qualitative assessment of the portal’s impact on the management of Public Employment Service resources, performed by managers. Informal feedback is collected from employers and practitioners on the content and usability of the portal.
- Response to a real need of the labour market of Portugal at the time of its conception;
- Suitability to different user’s needs for information and guidance;
- High levels of digital literacy amongst Portuguese citizens;
- Political support it received;
- Connection with the National Statistics Service for the provision of LMI;
- Hosting under IEFP.
- Poor dissemination of the portal.
- Fear that third parties may have access to some personal information.
- Weak computer knowledge of the guidance professionals.
Transferability elements
IEFP’s participation in the ELGPN Network and the need of citizens for interaction with the public and private services using ICT means, inspired the Institute to develop this national online guidance service. Vi@s online service was launched in 2012, when Portugal was heavily confronted with the impacts of the financial crisis upon its employment rates.
The costs for the overall development of the application that supports Vi@s portal are estimated around EUR 57 195.
Out of IEFP's 3 268 total staff, around 278 people (8,5%) were Guidance Professionals in 2016, allocated at employment centres or training centres.
- The Portal comprises multimedia elements, which contains documents, podcasts on employment, exploratory games, videos etc.;
- All stored documents can be sent by e-mail;
- The initiative does not require advanced IT literacy.
- Further personal, face-to-face counseling is needed afterwards;
- Stakeholders such as the Ministry of Education, employers, practitioners, as well as the end users contribute to the portal’s design and configuration and to the improvement of the services provided.
- Improvement and update of the portal through its integration within the new IEFP IT system;
- Improvement of the IEFP information system, to integrate it within the PES;
- Further development of the skills system.