NICE Academy 2021 in Paris from April 20-23

"Building Career Management Skills"

From April 20-23, 2021, the Network for Innovation in Career Guidance and Counselling will hold its third NICE Academy at the University of Paris. The academy will be dedicated to the challenges of “Building Career Management Skills.”

 We thank our host, Dr Laurent Sovet from the University of Paris, for his kind invitation and very much look forward to this event, which also marks the 10 th Anniversary of NICE.

We already have a great lineup of keynote lectures and workshops. Further calls for presentations will be announced soon. If you want to receive our regular updates, please subscribe by contacting us (below).

If you have any questions, please address them to paris2021@nice-network.eu.

Theme of the Academy

Career guidance and counselling is frequently viewed as a combination of providing people with career-related information and supporting them in making decisions about their education and work. However, career support also has an educational component: For example, in assisting clients in the preparation of application materials. Or in teaching clients how to find labor-market information themselves. Or in preparing clients to have difficult conversations with their parents or their employers.

When its educational component is forgotten or ignored, career guidance and counselling cannot unleash its full potential. By incorporating career education in our practice, we can empower people to master their career-related challenges autonomously; we can support them in attaining more control over their career development; in becoming more independent.

And we need to do so. While globalization and innovation bring many benefits, they also challenge people to engage in lifelong learning. Organizations, too, are under continuous pressure to adapt, with many of them become less hierarchic, smaller and more flexible. In this kind of an environment, citizens’ ability to manage their own career development becomes crucial. We need to prepare people to deal with career-related challenges across their lifetime, not only at the beginning of their careers. For this purpose, we need to promote citizens’ career management skills (CMS). However, many questions arise with this realization:

• What are the career management skills that actually support clients in mastering their career development? How do we know that they work?
• Does everybody need the same set of career management skills? Or are there meaningful differences between national contexts, labor markets...?
• How can career professionals effectively support clients in developing their career management skills? What approaches work? Why? And what if time is very limited?
• How can we assess, how well our clients are already prepared to deal with career-related challenges? What techniques and tools are there?
• How can career professionals work together with educational bodies to promote CMS? How could the role of career professionals change in the future?
• Are there any risks attached to the promotion of CMS? Could we be misleading clients in the long run? Could the promotion of CMS damage our profession?
• How can career practitioners be trained to build citizens’ CMS at universities and through further education? What knowledge, skills and competences are needed? How can they be developed?

These are the sorts of questions that the third NICE Academy in Paris will focus on. Through interactive keynote lectures, various training workshops to choose from, presentations of innovative approaches and important research findings, and various networking activities, we hope to foster a meaningful exchange of knowledge about the promotion of career management skills and career education.

Keynote Lectures

At the NICE Academy in Paris, we will welcome three international keynote lectures offered by:

• Hazel Reid, Canterbury Christ Church University, United Kingdom
• Laurent Sovet, University of Paris, France
• Rie Thomsen, Aarhus University Copenhagen, Denmark
• Tonje Gravås, Kompetanse Norge, Norway

Descriptions of the keynote lectures will follow soon.

Training Workshops

Training workshops provide highly interactive learning opportunities. They last 90 minutes and don’t require any preparation from participants. No more than 30 minutes should be dedicated to speeches or presentations. Activities can comprise group discussions, individual or group exercises, peer learning, discussions, collegial counselling/intervision, playing educational games, structured reflection, etc.

Organization

NICE Foundation (Responsible Organization): Johannes Katsarov

University of Paris (Host Organization): Dr Laurent Sovet

In Dialogue (Partner Organization): Yvor Broer