Higher Education (HE) students are increasingly aware of the changes in the labour market, marked by instability, the rise of new occupations, jobs, and functions, and the restructuring or disappearance of others, driven by digital advances, new social interaction patterns, and organizations’ demands, which highlight the need for new employee profiles (Bakhshi et al., 2017). At the same time, HE students are concerned with their preparation for the challenges ahead, when transitioning to the job market or trying to shift jobs, and have been noticing that technical field-related competencies are no longer sufficient to navigate the world of work and to succeed (Monteiro & Almeida, 2021a; Tomlinson, 2008).  This means that HE students are challenged to become active agents of their career from an early stage, in order to be able to explore - the self and the environment –, develop the necessary competencies, and prepare for the university-to-work and further possible transitions (García-Aracil et al., 2021).

The development of career resources, defined as “anything that helps an individual attain his or her career goals” (Hirschi et al., 2018, p. 4,) is, therefore, of the utmost importance, but the access to interventions with this scope is frequently limited by students’ preference for anonymity, difficulty in matching timetables or physical distances or financial costs (Gati & Asulin-Peretz, 2011). There is, therefore, the need for comprehensive and accessible interventions for people regardless of their economic, social, cultural, educational, or personal situation, in order to foster employability (UNESCO, 2019).

The identified needs motivated the construction of the Boost 4 Career (B4C) programme, a distance-based career resource intervention that seeks to promote the enrichment of the career resources of HE students with different individual and socio-cultural characteristics. This programme is framed within Hirschi and colleagues’ Career Resources Model (Hirschi et al., 2018) which proposes the organization of career resources in four main categories, namely: (a) human capital resources, which refer to knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that are important to meet performance expectations for a given occupation; (b) social capital resources, referring to resources external to the individual in terms of developmental networks, mentors, and available social support; (c) psychological resources, that include different positive psychological traits and states, and; (d) career identity resources, which include the conscious awareness of oneself as a worker and the subjective meanings linked with the work role. Additionally, the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2017), Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Krathwohl, 2002), and the virtual pedagogical model from Universidade Aberta (Pereira et al., 2007) guided the construction of the B4C programme, considering students’ motivation to personal and professional development and the emphasis on student-centred learning, flexibility, and digital inclusion.

The B4C programme aims to foster the career resources in a remote modality, giving HE students the opportunity to manage their time and space of learning. This free access programme aims to contribute to students’ engagement in career management, mainly among those who come from low-income backgrounds, those who may have professional responsibilities in addition to the academic ones, cultural minorities or older students who may want to improve their competencies (Carlsen et al., 2016).

Within this scope, this study aims to analyse to what extent can career resources be improved through a distance career intervention and whether the expected gains with the programme may vary depending on the students’ features, including social class, and work status (e.g., working students vs non-working students). The implications of this study and future directions for research and intervention will be addressed, considering the growing heterogeneity of student population in the HE institutions.

This study is framed in a broader project entitled “(Re)Search for Career: Distance career intervention, employability and social equity in the access to the labour market” (PTDC/CED-EDG/0122/2020), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. This study was approved by the Ethical Committees of both universities engaged in the project (CEISCH 076-2021). The participants of this study are approximately 300 HE students, from two public Portuguese universities, with heterogeneous features: diverse fields and years of study, working and non-working students, different socioeconomical backgrounds and a wide age range. Data will be collected during the second semester of the academic year of 2022/2023, in an online setting. The Programme B4C is provided remotely, without any costs. It includes six modules with the following objectives: 0) Pre-test assessment, programme presentation and familiarization with the eLearning platform and with participants and moderator; 1) Promotion of career exploration and job market knowledge; 2) Promotion of occupational expertise, soft skills and continuous learning; 3) Promotion of organizational career support and networking; 4) Promotion of career clarity and career confidence; 5) Post-test assessment and closure of the digital learning portfolio. In each module, students are requested to perform individual and group activities, of three complexity levels, that demand around 60 minutes to complete in total. A moderator is responsible for monitoring students’ activities, providing feedback when necessary to foster their engagement, eliciting constructive discussions, and providing pedagogical and technical support (Kettunen et al., 2020). For the assessment of the programme B4C, students will complete a sociodemographic questionnaire (sex, age, work status, parental education…) and, they will answer to the Career Resources Questionnaire (Hirschi et al., 2018; adapt. Monteiro & Almeida, 2021b), that assesses HE students’ career resources, and fill in the Career Exploration Survey (Stumpf et al., 1983; adapt. Taveira, 1997), the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (Deci et al., 1994), the Basic Psychological Need Scale (BPNS) - Basic Need Satisfaction in General (Deci & Ryan, 2009), and the Digital Competences of Higher Education Students (van Deursen et al., 2015; adapt. Aires et al., 2022). These instruments will be responded by the experimental group and a control group, before and after the programme’s implementation. Statistical analyses will be computed to determine if there are significant differences among groups and if sociodemographic variables, including social class and work status, can predict the results of the programme. After the programme, focus groups will be organized with a random sample to gather qualitative data on the programme.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a distance-based career intervention programme and its impact according to students’ social class and work status. With the analysis of the B4C programme’s results we expect to gather evidence concerning the extent to which career resources can be improved through remote intervention and the influence of students’ characteristics on the programme outcomes. This study is expected to contribute to the development of knowledge about students' career resources throughout their HE studies, according to different personal and contextual circumstances, and the development of knowledge about the impact of this intervention with HE students, with diverse individual and contextual characteristics, increasing evidence-based practices in this field. It is expected that this programme, mostly asynchronous and fully online, with free access to every student and accessible to a variety of students, including non-traditional ones, may contribute to overcoming some career guidance challenges that have been pointed out, such as difficulty in matching timetables, physical distances, or financial costs (Gati & Asulin-Peretz, 2011). It is expected a positive impact on participants’ career resources and future career trajectories, particularly among the most vulnerable students. In addition, it is expected that the evaluation of this new intervention programme might contribute to informing about the effectiveness of further career intervention actions. Providing policy makers, educators and students with evidence of the feasibility and utility of distance interventions on career resources may be a way to improve employability and mitigate social inequalities, fulfilling the recommendations of UNESCO (2019) and the sustainable development goals for comprehensive and accessible education. Future research should investigate how the B4C programme may influence students’ transition to the labour market.

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