Public Employment Services (PES) in Europe and their employees are facing fundamental challenges to the delivery of efficient and effective services and need to change their strategies to combat rising unemployment and demographic change. Career adaptability, defined as the ability to manage successful transitions in employment, training, education and other contexts, consistently across the life-course is increasingly seen as a key part of the solution to these challenges (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012; Brown et al., 2012). However, supporting the development of career adaptability in the customers/clients of PES requires PES practitioners (1) to enhance their own career adaptability and (2) to transform their own individual and collective professional identity. Such a transformational process is a complex and continuous learning process that needs a holistic, technology-enhanced approach to facilitation and support of PES providers and their staff. The EU-funded EmployID project aims to deliver comprehensive, sustainable, and cost-effective support for the facilitation of professional identity transformation as a complex and continuous learning process, on an individual, organisational and European network level using a holistic tool suite combining and linking eCoaching, reflection, MOOCs, networking, analytical and learning support tools, leading to improved individual and organisational performance on employment counselling. One of the first needs identified by the project relates to Labour Market Information (LMI). Employment engagement practitioners are required to increase performance/professionalism in their outward facing role with employers. To do this, they need to be able to update themselves on up-to-date LMI quickly and efficiently. A key feature of the training support is an LMI application – based on the UK Commission for Education and Skills ‘LMI for All’ database. Different sectors (like distribution) can be interrogated against various criteria (e.g. projections for the sector in the region; pay rates; skill gaps, etc.) The application is not only designed to provide access to labour market data, but to allow them to save searches, to add their own comments, to ask for further clarification or support and to share this with colleagues. In order to help with this, the project is piloting the design of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on ‘the changing world of work’. Features in this MOOC include tools that provide learning content and structured learning, which enable practitioners to reflect critically on the applicability of LMI to their work and stimulate the further sharing of good practice related to the learning content.

Bimrose, J., & Hearne, L. (2012). Resilience and Career Adaptability: Qualitative Studies of Adult Career counselling. Journal Of Vocational Behavior, 81, 338 – 344. Brown, A., Bimrose, J., Barnes, S-A. & Hughes, D. (2012). The role of career adaptabilities for mid-career changers. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 80 (3 ), 754 – 761 Conole, G. (2013) MOOCs as disruptive technologies: strategies for enhancing the learner experience and quality of MOOCs., [Preprint] http://eprints.rclis.org/19388/