Goals
The European Doctoral Programme in Career Guidance and Counselling (ECADOC) aims to train future academic and practitioner leaders in the field of career guidance and counselling to become interdisciplinary researchers with strong leadership and teaching competences. The programme is a joint initiative of the European Society for Vocational Designing and Career Counseling (ESVDC) and the Foundation of the Network for Innovation in Career Guidance and Counselling in Europe (NICE Foundation), and is supported by higher education institutions from more than 10 European countries.
The ESVDC and NICE jointly offer ECADOC to support higher education institutions and research bodies across Europe in offering specialised doctoral training to PhD candidates in our field. In a single European country, setting up a structured doctoral programme on career guidance and counselling – or even career-related questions – is hardly possible or sustainable – due to the high specialization and the low number of research centres within even the larger countries. Doctoral researchers in the domain of career guidance and counselling tend to either work solitarily, or to be enrolled in broad structured doctoral programmes at their universities, e.g., in the domain of education, social sciences, or psychology. Under these circumstances, doctoral researchers with a focus on career guidance and counselling can barely gain deep insights into the specialised research and development efforts that are taking place across Europe, and tend to suffer from a lack of fruitful exchange – a great barrier to innovation in our field.
Disclaimer
The ECADOC project was co-funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme from October 2013 to November 2016 (Project No. 539608-LLP-1-2013-1-IT-ERASMUS-EQR). The European Commission’s support for the ECADOC project does not constitute an endorsement of its achievements, contents, or professed opinions. These reflect the views of the project partners only, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use of these products.