IFSI Seminar 2 Recap: When the Map no longer matches the terrain

The second webinar in the IFSI series — organized by UOC with collaboration from the OECD (and their Skills and Work unit) is now available for viewing below.

In this seminar, we asked some existential questions for education institutions in the face of policrisis, uncertainty, and disruption: how can universities use skills intelligence to redesign student support, career guidance and learner pathways, and can they do it fast enough to matter?

Participants in the session made contributions which offered some insight into concrete solutions through cutting-edge case-presentations and research findings.

First up was CEDEFOP‘s new EU Lifelong Guidance Framework offering a policy response — 18 guidelines for building guidance systems that are inclusive, data-informed, and continuous across a person’s life, not just frontloaded at the beginning of an individuals career, or as they finalize training.

Kerry McKittrick from the Harvard Project on Workforce presented findings from their new report Pivots Without Pathways. Based on two years of rigorous mixed-methods research with community college students and low-wage workers, exactly the type of applied labour market research necessary for impact in education systems,  the report argues that careers today are defined less by planned trajectories than by repeated, often forced pivots — made without reliable information, appropriate coaching, or the social networks that more privileged students have access to. Their findings, in many ways, argue that the career navigation systems currently in place are still optimized for a labor market that no longer exists.

Then came the two use case presentations. Martín Serrano presented 1MentorQS which has been built on 500 million job postings across 190 countries, demonstrated throught clear use cases how universities can use labour market insights to support both career navigation and curriculum review. 

Marina Muñoz then presented UOC’s own GPS Professional: a skills navigation platform that lets students compare their own profile against live ESCO and Lightcast demand data, identify gaps, and get concrete recommendations.

IFSI seminars aim to cut through the noise and capture the most important signals across the shifting landscape in higher education.  What´s bcome clear is that evidence-driven decision making has become an essential part of the solution for both learners and organizations in higher education. Beyond adding technology, what must higher education institutions change structurally to genuinely improve career navigation support for the learners who need it most?