Abstract:

Our study is determined by the fact that the current Romanian society is still tributary to misconceptions related to the access to psychological services of any kind, including those dedicated to career guidance. As a rule, Romanian universities offer counselling services organized face-to-face, showing either disbelief or reluctance to offer this type of service online. The barriers to online counselling are diverse: technical, attitudinal, financial, temporal, professional, all of them contribute to aggravate this approach. Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău (VAUB), Romania offers counselling services, including career guidance, but students do not access them in a relevant proportion. Among the main causes that hinder access to counselling services we mention: low level of accessing this type of services in high schools; students’ lack of time (some are already employed, in order to support themselves financially); students’ preference for online activities; the distance from home to university, where access to counselling is available. So far, there has not been in force at VAUB an ICT tool designed to offer the opportunity to provide online career counselling sessions. Such an opportunity can ensure the overcoming of the issues mentioned above and the access to a service in accordance with the needs of digital natives. Therefore, amid the growing appetite of young people to use online resources and their interest in self-knowledge and personal development, we felt it was necessary to adapt the counselling services for students to meet these emerging needs.

The purpose of our research is to explain, present and illustrate how a student career counselling platform was developed and used, especially regarding the section dedicated for online counselling. Within the project CNFIS-FDI-2018-0223 "Effective Communication and Educational Counselling for Integration on the Labour Market" (acronym CECIM), currently running at VAUB, there has been designed, developed, implemented and used an online platform - http://portal-dcp.ub.ro/cecim2018 that contains a section for online counselling. During the current experimental phase of the project (that lasts until December 2018), participation in this type of service is expected to be of at least 100 students in the final bachelor’s year; for the following year, the goal is to extend the use of the platform for all VAUB students. We believe that both experimenting with the platform and analysing the obtained results will generate a series of conclusions regarding the ICT component of the services and the interpersonal and professional dimension of online counselling services that may be used to optimize the platform and expand its purpose.

Keywords:

Online career counselling, ICT tool, the labour market.