The FUTURE Time Traveller turns one year!

12 months ago our multinational team started a future-looking initiative, aiming to transform career guidance of generation Z through an innovative, games-based scenario approach and to prepare the next generation for the jobs of the future.

• Our primary goal is to foster a future-oriented mindset. Our innovative career exploration game in 3D virtual world will help young people explore the future world, understanding the LM trends, emerging job and skills and develop an ownership of their own future.
• Secondly, we want to enhance the capacity of career guidance practitioners for delivering future-oriented career services. For this purpose we will produce practical guidelines, workshops, contest and best practices e-book, supporting innovative career guidance.
• In the end, we hope to give impetus to innovation and future-oriented policy with our study “Future-looking career guidance” and impact assessment report, which will summarize the results and produce evidence of how these methods work.

This one year has been a very productive time, full of inspiration and successful activities:

• We conducted a survey to identify how prepared are young people for the jobs of the future; how equipped are career guidance practitioners with the skills to guide them; and what kind of support will policy makers need to offer.
• We produced a policy roadmap report Future-Looking Career Guidance Agenda.
• We elaborated the methodology and scenarios of our Future Time Traveller career game and started the development of the 3D virtual world platform, in which the game will take place.
• We launched the project website https://future-time-traveller.eu and its Facebook page, which already has more than 270 followers.
• The results produced so far have been presented during seminars for policy makers.

Here are some of the messages the participants shared after the event in Bulgaria:

• “We, as career consultants, should not sit and wait for the future to come – we need to be the guides – guides to the future.”
• “If we want our children to be complete individuals, adequate to the world, now is the time to invest effort to provide them with the opportunity to achieve it!”
• “Wonderful, up-to-date, innovative, fashionable and very useful to young generation Z project! It is necessary to actively and quickly update the digital skills of the career counselors themselves. It is very important for them to “speak” the new “mother tongue” of young people in order to be as useful as possible.”
• “Career counseling is obviously changing. There is a need to include career counselors in forms for maintaining qualifications.”
• “The future of our profession depends on our ability to keep up with all the trends. We must try to be informative for our clients. Game-based approach is the future of learning.”
• “This project proves that in today’s Bulgaria there are still people who think about the challenges of the future and do not spare efforts and energy to be part of it and fulfill their duty to future generations.”

What will the FUTURE bring?

Next year, after testing and piloting, the platform and methodology will be presented in demonstration events and creative workshops on developing scenarios for innovative career guidance. We will organize a competition for innovative career guidance services and a Facebook contest for young people Time Capsule “Jobs of the Future”.

In 2020 the best practices and ideas from the two contests will be collected in an E-book and the partners will elaborate a policy evidence report. The two products will complement the FUTURE Roadmap report which will help mainstream the project approach, methodology and policy messages. The project results will be presented in final events in all partner countries.