The project "Worklife Guidance - Development of guidance and counseling in the workplace" is about bringing together methods used within career guidance and counselling, validation of prior learning and Human Resource Management and build a toolbox for providers of guidance services to use when working with managers and employees in the workplace on a strategical development of the workforce competences. In the modern society people cannot rely on the skills they acquired at school to last them till the end of their working life and companies need up-skilled and re-skilled workforce to be able to cope with the rapid market changes. The main aim of this project is to make it clear to both parties, employees and employers, that a strategical development of skills and competences should be a part of every-day work-life and that the responsibility is mutual. The target groups of this project are: a) Individual employees, who wish to enhance their professional skills and competences for a more fulfilling work-life. Focus will be on the importance of maintaining one owns career management skills throughout the entire working life. b) Managers, especially within human resource management, and employers, who wish to enhance the professional skills of their workforce in a strategical way. c) Providers of guidance services, as they will be trained in how to approach both groups and gain trust in the methodology used. This is important as the structure of the education of counsellors, at least in Finland and Iceland, is mainly directed to counselling within schools at lower and upper secondary level, where the main objectives are to help children and young adults to stay in school and get education. Through this project, the counsellors will be able to take over new challenges and help adults and managers build a mutual strategy for competence development by using educational offers as well as the opportunities at the workplace. Through this the partnership wants to: - Strengthen the competences and believe of managers and middle-managers to use counseling and coaching methods to map competences and possible skills gaps. - Strengthen the believe of employees towards a systematic development of competences to develop their competences and meet organization or sector needs. - Bring down barriers towards the use of competence modeling and measurements/mapping of skills mismatch. - More efficiency in the use of finances used for development of human resource within organisations. - Strengthen adult education’s connections, relationships and service models with companies through the work of career counsellors and through the co-working models of career counsellors and vocational experts - Share and compare models of guidance at the workplace in order to develop models to be used by adult education / career counsellors Expected products: Comparison of methods/models. Research and comparison of methods/models used within career guidance and counseling, validation of prior learning and human resource management. Gathering of the experience of partners within the field(s). On the basis of this comparison partners will be able to understand the issue better and choose models that will better serve the respective employment sector and/or companies that each participating organization is cooperating with. Toolbox for providers of guidance services will be the core of the project outcomes and include promotional material to be used by the providers of the guidance services, models to be used when providing the service, guidelines on how to approach employees and employers to gain trust in the services, training program for providers of the guidance services. - Model(s) of counseling, guidance for individuals. This includes production of material to support the providers of the counselling service when working with individuals. - Model(s) of counseling, guidance for managers. This includes production of material to support the providers of the counselling service when working with managers. - Training for providers of guidance services About the partnership: The participating organizations come from five different European countries, Iceland, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden. They bring different aspects to the project work as they objectives of their work are different, covering adult education, guidance and counseling services, validation of prior learning, research on education and training systems in Europe and cooperation with the business world. This will secure a very broad approach to the theme and objectives of this partnership project. The benefits of this project for providers of guidance services will be that they have better access to the companies and employees as both parties will better understand the importance of letting the competence development of employees go hand in hand with the needs of the company.