Youngsters to play star role in career planning

It's called career planning - but not as we know it. A radical approach to the way secondary school pupils plan their future takes off this week in the Highlands and Islands.

From video diaries to digital voting, Careers Scotland has called in a huge range of technologies to transform the way young people make decisions about the world of work and their place in it.

Called i hero, the new initiative is being piloted across the region and ties into the Scottish Government's Curriculum for Excellence, described as the biggest reform in education for a generation. If successful the project could be rolled out Scotland-wide.

 i hero events involving up to 1500 S3 pupils will take place in nine locations throughout the region with Orkney hosting the first event today (May 7). Other events will run until August.

Iain Eisner of Careers Scotland says: "In terms of career planning, the i hero experience is unique. We're using technologies which have never been used before in this area and its purpose is to get young people excited about their future choices and become the heroes of their own stories.

"This is a national pilot being trialled in the Highlands and Islands. We've tremendous confidence that it will work not least because it was developed with a huge amount of input from young people themselves who made it very clear about what gets them fired up when thinking about their future."

With its own website and istore, i hero takes pupils through seven different workshops with the outcomes recorded using bar coding software.

The workshops take pupils on a journey into the future; they look at what might be making the headlines in years to come, what their own lives will look like in 2020, what inspires them, how they fare at making decisions, their top six skills are and where they'd want to develop these.

The workshops, which run over two days, culminate with an i hero party where the young people get to share what they have achieved in their lives as if it was the year 2020.

Iain Eisner says: "I hero will make a huge contribution to the learning for life and work agenda. It will encourage young people to start picturing the life they want, start exercising control over their future and become informed and enthusiastic about the world of work."