Current Projects

The CRWG has received major funding to develop and evaluate interventions focusing on increasing career mobility within small and medium enterprises (SME). In Canada, a typical pattern is that people begin working for a SME and after the initial training they start to get comfortable in their role and begin to think about career advancement. Often they see employment with another firm as the only way of advancing their career or of doing more interesting and satisfying work. Thus, career mobility from SMEs to other organizations is high, and the time and money spent in training is not a high yield investment. Any intervention that can help employees see opportunities for career advancement within their current organization is thought to be of potential benefit. Members of the CRWG have been busy with four main projects.

• Situation analysis. A survey has been developed to determine the career development needs of employees and employers in SMEs. Before interventions can be developed, it is useful to find out from the potential users of the intervention what they would find useful. Preliminary data have been collected and are being analysed. These data will form the basis for developing the interventions. Three levels of intervention are planned, itemized as #2, #3, and #4 below.
• A minimally intensive intervention, self-administered and delivered via the internet. This intervention is currently under development. It will incorporate several promising practices from previous programs and is intended to help participants become more self-empowered in managing their career-life path.
• A moderately intensive intervention named “Career Conversations.” This is an organizational capacity building intervention, where managers will be trained to initiate career conversations with their employees regarding the employee’s career-life goals and how their current organization can help to foster the achievement of those goals. The intent is that managers will avoid trying to do career guidance, but instead have both formal and informal conversations with employees regarding their future plans and how those plans can be realized within an organization.
• An intensive intervention titled “Bilan des competences.” This intervention involves formal career guidance or career counselling that helps employees to identify their transferable competencies and explore venues for where those competencies can be put to good use.

The CRWG was not able to obtain funding to validate the evaluation framework it had developed, but it was able to receive funding for program development projects. The funding is formally designated for the development and field-testing of new interventions, however we were able to undertake the program development in a manner that will permit the validation of our evaluation framework. We have continued to revise and elaborate our evaluation framework. We are in the final stages of developing an assessment instrument that will collect data on learning outcomes and changes in personal attributes that will provide comparable results across the three types of interventions mentioned above. Data on the project as a whole is anticipated to be available in late 2009 or early 2010.

Presentations have been made at provincial, national, and international conferences, describing our evaluation framework and some of the initial field-testing that has been done. These have been received enthusiastically and it seems to us that people in the field are eager to embrace the ideas and try to implement them in their home settings. Several organizations have adopted the evaluation framework and are using it to generate better efficacy data, which is having a positive effect on the service providers and also on the program administrators. One project has been able to obtain data providing an explicit link between engagement in the program, the learning outcomes (knowledge and skills), some attitudinal change (optimism and self-confidence), and employment status. A second project which is currently in progress will be able to provide data on the engagement of service providers taking in-house training, learning outcomes of the service providers, degree of implementation of the training, and impact on clients. The reactions we have received so far have been very positive and they suggest to us that people in the field support the direction we are taking.