Why a research directory?
This research directory is being constructed to address two key motives
1. To highlight research to students and practitioners: The CDI and recognise there is a gap between research and practice: Thousands of studies have been carried out into careers development and guidance, but can be difficult to find, behind paywalls or written for academic audiences.
2. Making the case for investment: The sector, and those operating within it, continually needs to make the case for their work and future investments in CEIAG, whether to Government or decision makers and colleagues in their institutions.
Aims
Our goals are to support you, and other professionals, in and around the careers sector, by:
1. Highlighting evidence for the effectiveness of career guidance, so you and our profession can more readily make the case for investment and support. (This includes showing how guidance contributes to key wider social and economic challenges, beyond the client).
2. Highlighting the evidence on "what works" in practice, to inform choices in interventions with different groups.
3. To support both career-guidance students and practitioner researchers, by providing the landscape of existing research, and ideas for research gaps that they could contribute to filling through small scale research projects - contributing to personal learning and CPD.
Content and scope
We don't aspire to include all papers! For one its impossible, and secondly, we are particularly looking for papers that contribute to our aims above. Also to support these aims, we have organised the directory into these sections:
Client groups: The focus is to demonstrate, for each group (e.g. schools). the CEIAG landscape and client challenges, evidence for CEIAG having an impact, relevant case studies, active research organisations, further resources, and some high level research gaps
Practices: The focus, here, is on publications that have outlined methodologies and outcomes for practice, grouped by type of intervention.
Challenges: We have covered the discussions on how CEIAG contributes to our "grand" challenges beyond the client: Economic performance, EDI, Sustainability and Wellbeing.
Researcher resources: Here we link to a database of papers, journals, books (many free) and other tips for careers researchers.
Contributing & benefitting
We can't do this alone! We more than welcome various forms of contribution to this resource from practitioners, students and researchers.
- Ad-hoc: We welcome you getting in touch about anything from broken links, or clarifications, to the identification of a new paper you think we should include.
- Submit your paper or thesis: Submit your paper, conference paper or thesis to our library. (If we don't include it in the main pages, we can certainly include it in our database for others to find).
- Contact us about authoring a topic area: There are a myriad of possible topic areas that can't possibly cover them all in depth. If you are interested in writing a page that reviews evidence, case studies, data and resources for a particular "focus area" or theme, please get in touch!
In return, the benefits to you can be: a) CPD, b) personal learning, c) CV material, d) Contribution to your profession. Or all of the above!
You can also contact us if you are want to talk through your study or work, and want help to navigate the research landscape.
Evolution
We recognise lots of scope to evolve and improve our initial directory (as of Summer 2024). Over time, we would like to:
- Continually update the resource with new, relevant publications.
- Create profiles of important client groups in our "Focus areas" section, particularly disadvantaged or intersectional groups, where careers practice may benefit from adaptation.
- Add new "Practices", like self-management, mentoring and career data and analytics.
- Improve the user experience and website functionality to make it easier to search, access, use, comment, and contribute.
- Connect to global organisations also engaged in these topics.