Career Compass was conceived as a modern, digital and learner-centred model for helping young adults take control of their careers in an uncertain labour market.

The core project idea

The project, Finding Career Roadmaps for a New Era, started from the view that career guidance could no longer be limited to occasional advice, school-based services or a single decision about a profession. Young adults were expected to navigate repeated changes in work, skills and opportunities over their lives. The project therefore treated career planning as a learnable competence: a structured set of skills that people could develop, practise and apply independently.

Its central idea was to give young adults a practical “career compass” for understanding themselves, recognising their strengths, exploring possibilities, building supportive networks and making adaptable career plans. It combined this with resilience and wellbeing, recognising that uncertainty, job loss and insecure work could undermine confidence and motivation as well as employment prospects.

The problem it addressed

The project was designed in response to several connected challenges:

• Post-pandemic disruption: Young adults were disproportionately affected by COVID-19-related job losses and reduced opportunities, especially in sectors vulnerable to shutdowns. This made entry into employment and progression to better-paid roles more difficult.
• A changing labour market: The idea of a “job for life” or a fixed skill set was no longer realistic. Digitalisation, shifting employer needs and volatile labour markets required people to adapt throughout their working lives.
• Gaps in career guidance: Guidance services were described as fragmented across Europe. Services were often stronger for people in formal education and less accessible to young adults in employment, unemployment, insecure work or community settings.
• Limited digital resources: There was a shortage of flexible, accessible digital career-management tools specifically designed for young adults outside formal school or VET contexts.
• Need for better-supported educators: Community-based adult educators and guidance staff often worked directly with young adults but needed training and ready-to-use tools to deliver modern, digitally supported career guidance.

The project’s response was to join lifelong learning and lifelong guidance: instead of treating career advice as separate from education, it embedded career-management learning into accessible adult-education resources.

The intended change

Career Compass aimed to shift the emphasis from professionals managing a young person’s career to young adults becoming capable of managing their own career development. This meant helping them to:

• Reflect on their identity, interests, values and goals.
• Identify and build their competences.
• Explore employment and learning opportunities.
• Plan realistic, flexible career pathways.
• Develop networks and seek support.
• Build resilience, confidence and wellbeing strategies when facing uncertainty.

At the same time, adult educators were to become multipliers of this approach. They were trained not only to use the project materials but also to understand micro-learning and create their own short digital learning resources for young adults.

The learning model: career management plus resilience

The learning content was structured around the Scottish Career Management Skills Framework. This gave the project a recognised framework for defining career-planning learning outcomes rather than offering generic advice. The four areas were:

• Self: developing self-awareness and understanding one’s place in society.
• Strengths: recognising, acquiring and building competences for rewarding work and learning.
• Horizons: visualising, planning and working towards career aspirations over time.
• Networks: building relationships and networks of support.

These themes were supplemented by resilience and wellbeing content. The project recognised that career planning was less effective if learners were struggling with anxiety, low self-belief or uncertainty. The resilience resources therefore addressed areas such as emotional intelligence and emotional control, self-care, managing expectations and making supportive connections.

The content was designed at introductory and advanced levels, broadly aligned with EQF Levels 3 and 4, to make it useful for learners with different starting points.

The MOOC as the project’s main access point

A defining feature of the project idea was the use of a multilingual MOOC platform as the main delivery and sustainability mechanism. The platform was intended to make career guidance available beyond face-to-face appointments, fixed course schedules and national boundaries.

The MOOC hosted the Career Compass materials as free Open Educational Resources in all eight partner languages. It was designed to provide a self-directed learning environment where young adults could access career-development support independently, while also giving educators a structured set of resources to use in workshops, courses and guidance activities.

The MOOC contained:

• 40 micro-learning resources, each delivered through a short video or animation.
• A learner handout and self-reflection activity for every resource, with step-by-step instructions for independent learning.
• A one-hour lesson plan for every resource, enabling adult educators to use the same content in guided sessions.
• An online quiz or assessment linked to each learning unit, helping each resource operate as a stand-alone learning module.
• The Career Model Canvas, a planning tool inspired by the structure of the Business Model Canvas. It helped learners consider their self-awareness, strengths, future horizons and networks when evaluating possible careers and identifying development needs.
• A downloadable and online professional-development programme for adult educators.

In effect, the MOOC converted career guidance into a reusable digital learning system. A young adult could use it privately and at their own pace, while a teacher, youth worker or career adviser could select individual resources and integrate them into a local programme.

Why micro-learning was central

The project used micro-learning because short, focused digital resources were considered more accessible and practical for young adults and community educators. Rather than asking learners to complete a long, formal course, it broke career development into small, manageable units that could be accessed online and shared through digital and social channels.

Each unit paired a concise digital explanation with a practical activity. This approach supported both knowledge and application: learners did not only receive information about careers; they were asked to reflect, map their options, assess their skills and make decisions relevant to their own circumstances.

For educators, the approach made it easier to introduce career-management learning within existing provision. They could use a single one-hour resource where appropriate, rather than having to adopt an entirely new curriculum.

Supporting the professionals around young adults

Career Compass did not rely solely on self-directed learning. It recognised that adults working in community education, guidance, youth support and related services were key intermediaries. The project therefore developed a 42-hour professional-development programme for adult education and guidance professionals.

The programme covered three areas:

1. Micro-learning theory: how short, modular learning can be applied in adult education.
2. Creating micro-learning resources: how educators could develop their own digital resources for young adults.
3. Career management and resilience: how to use the Scottish framework and respond to the career and wellbeing needs of young adults.

This made the project a capacity-building initiative as well as a resource-development initiative. Its aim was not only to distribute content but to strengthen the ability of local educators to deliver flexible and relevant guidance over time.

Building collaboration around career guidance

The project also aimed to reduce fragmentation between services. It sought to bring together adult education, VET, schools, youth organisations, employers, employee representatives, guidance providers and public bodies.

Career-management and resilience workshops in the partner countries, along with a final conference in Iceland, were intended to showcase the resources, involve stakeholders and encourage local cooperation. The underlying idea was that guidance would be more effective if it was connected to learning providers, labour-market actors and local support networks rather than delivered in isolation.

Inclusion, accessibility and long-term use

The project was designed for broad access, including young adults in insecure work, unemployment, low-skilled employment or situations of exclusion. Resources were translated and localised for the eight partner countries, written in accessible language and designed with introductory instruction for learners with lower digital confidence.

The online materials were intended to follow WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidance and Universal Design for Learning principles. They were to be shared under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence, allowing free use and reuse with attribution.

Sustainability was built around the MOOC: it was planned to remain available for five years after the end of the project, while partner organisations could link to or embed the resources on their own websites. The materials were also to be shared through European platforms such as EPALE, SALTO-Youth, ENTER and the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform.

Overall concept

Career Compass was therefore not simply a collection of career-advice materials. It was a European adult-education model that combined digital micro-learning, self-directed career planning, resilience support, educator training and cross-sector collaboration. Its intended long-term value was a free, multilingual MOOC-based infrastructure through which young adults could build career-management skills and educators could deliver more accessible, flexible lifelong guidance.