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
Services offered to young people:
- Career Guidance Information;
- Personal Discussion on Career Information;
- Application Training;
- Orientation Checks;
- Occupation Tasting;
- Career Guidance Brochures.
Services to companies: Support for apprentice selection and Image building of professions and industries.
BiWi supports teachers by: Industry Presentations and class visits to the premises of BiWi.
For parents and guardians, BiWi organises dedicated parents' evenings.
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
The LMI integrated in the online tools of BiWi includes:
- information on examples of professions and companies, labour market statistics and trends;
- information on occupations through films with professionals describing their daily routine;
- essential information for job applications with CV examples and tips for interviews;
- information on the available apprenticeships’ positions;
- information on the Austrian education system and involved establishments.
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
There are three external IT companies supporting the technical work of BiWi and maintaining all its webpages. BiWi employees have editorial rights only for the content of their in-house website.
Inside the BiWi premises there are 28 computers that can be used from visitors to access information, which is only available there.
Results and impacts obtained
- Quantitative: in 2015, more than 10 000 students visited BiWi during class visits, while it helped more than 21 863 young people to get a “taste” of various occupations and work places. Additionally, 1 520 parents participated in parents' evenings and 591 teachers participated in conferences.
- Qualitative outcomes: fast response to changing conditions/situations due to agile information gathering/ provision by crowd sourcing approach as well as relevance/ fit-for-purpose of information/feedback due to bottom-up approach.
- Evaluation process: no official process. BiWi is open for feedback and gathers it in a rather informal way, mainly through discussions with teachers that visit BiWi with their classes.
- Highly qualified employees with solid scientific background and expertise and open mind set, as well highly motivated advisers;
- Mouth-to-mouth marketing of the BiWi services;
- Excellent cooperation with the Chamber and political support from the president of the Chamber;
- Provision of the right offers specialised to the needs of the target groups.
- Lack of properly adjusted material and information for the career guidance of older adults.
- Limited personnel in accordance with the increasing demand for career guidance and information services.
- The activities of BiWi are highly depended on the labour market information and material provided by companies.
- Limited number of Industry Presentations.
- Services are restricted to the users of the province Vienna.
Transferability elements
- The development of BiWi is the personal act and idea of BiWi's former director, who was the initiator of the idea of creating a platform that, could bring together employers with future candidates of the labour market.
- Although there is not a specific policy framework stating the importance of ICT and LMI in frameworks for career training and guidance in Austria, the Annual Plan of the Viennese Economic Chamber for 2017 is a key document pointing out the role of ICT and LMI in the BiWi services in Vienna.
BiWi is financed through the Viennese Economic Chamber and has a yearly budget of over EUR 500 000 spending:
- 65% on personnel costs;
- 10% on IT and online services and operational and maintenance costs of IT infrastructures; and the rest for other running costs (rent, marketing, PR, etc.).
Career counsellors of BiWi have diverse educational backgrounds, are well-aware of the Austrian education system and labour market and have good presentation skills. They are required to have in-depth knowledge of their profession; be team players and open-minded.
There are no special required skills for using the services at BiWi or uploading relevant content. Recently, an automated online tool for booking appointments with classes optimised the process.
The non-ICT elements of the practice include events, dedicated parents' evenings; and parent-teacher conferences.
Also, the Ministry of Education and Women’s Affairs and the Institute ‘Research and Development in VET’ are important partners in the work of BiWi providing useful material.
BiWi's challenge for the next five years, together with its premises renovation, is to modernise its offers to resonate more with the young people.