CURSOR Career Planning Resources & Handbook

The partners in the project CURSOR have developed a full suite of innovative tools for youth workers who wish to support young people with fewer opportunities in Career Planning. These tools are educational resources for career planning that can be used in day-to-day youth work.

The project CURSOR has developed career planning resources and tools to be used by youth workers to support the young people to take control of their career. The resources have been developed based on a thorough needs analysis which was the initial stage of the project CURSOR. The needs analysis has been developed in parallel with a Learning Outcomes Matrix.

The resources are grouped in four themes:

SELF: Understanding your personality, interests and values

STRENGTHS: Know how to use your talents and personal qualities

HORIZONS: Visualise yourself in the world of work, training and learning

NETWORKS: Identify who can support you finding opportunities for education and work

The classification of the above themes has been inspired by the Career Management Skills (CMS) Framework of Scotland.

The learning resources developed to constitute a complete in-service training programme for the continuous professional development of front-line youth workers. With the use of these resources, the youth workers can support young people to acquire career planning skills and identify their career pathways.

Each learning resource has been produced in video format to support learning in a variety of different learning environments. The video has been uploaded on the E- learning portal of the project but also on Youtube. All the resources are available in all partner languages; Greek, English, Polish, and Romanian.

Six resources have been developed for each of the themes of Self, Strengths, Horizons, and Networks; three of them being Introductory (I) and three of them being Advanced (A). The structure of the resources is as follows:

CURSOR R1 Self 1 (I) – Work Values
CURSOR R2 Self 2 (I) – My Self in Society
CURSOR R3 Self 3 (I) – The Sense of Self
CURSOR R4 Self 2 (A) – Self-knowledge Journal
CURSOR R5 Self 5 (A) – Stress Management to Build Personal Resilience
CURSOR R6 Self 6 (A) – The Social Self
CURSOR R7 Strengths 1 (I) – Strengths Development Planner
CURSOR R8 Strengths 2 (I) – Personal Timeline – Tracking my Achievement
CURSOR R9 Strengths 3 (I) – Evaluate Your Strengths
CURSOR R10 Strengths 4 (A) – Growth Mindset
CURSOR R11 Strengths 5 (A) – Using my Strengths to Set Career Goals
CURSOR R12 Strengths 6 (A) – Boost your career
CURSOR R13 Horizons 1 (I) – Growth Tree
CURSOR R14 Horizons 2 (I) – Identifying Transferable Skills
CURSOR R15 Horizons 3 (I) – Plan your Career Pathway
CURSOR R16 Horizons 4 (A) – Personal Scenario Planning
CURSOR R17 Horizons 5 (A) – Presenting Transferable Skills
CURSOR R18 Horizons 6 (A) – Factors around Planning Career Pathways
CURSOR R19 Network 1 (I) – Making Connections
CURSOR R20 Networks 2 (I) – Developing your Elevator Pitch
CURSOR R21 Networks 3 (I) – Networking – why to do it
CURSOR R22 Network 4 (A) – Social Networking Diary
CURSOR R23 Networks 5 (A) – Building EQ for Career Success
CURSOR R24 Networks 6 (A) – Networking – how to do it

Handbook

For each of the above educational resources, the partners have developed additional educational material. This material constitutes the HANDBOOK you are now holding in your hands or reading online.

For each of the resources, you can find the following material: Theoretical background, guidelines on how to use the resource and, references (in the cases where there are additional resources you can study).

The aim of the guidelines on how to use the resources is to ensure that front-line youth workers, youth leaders, youth volunteers and any other potential intermediaries are confident in using them to support young people in career planning.