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The future - it is certain that it will come. And that's the only certainty associated with it. When choosing your profession in high school or university, have you ever wondered if it will still exist in 5-10 years? And if you were career counselors, would you steer young people's careers towards a profession that will be useless in a few years' time?

The future cannot be predicted, but it can be explored. Simply put, this is what foresight does. Nowadays, in the face of the uncertainty and unpredictability of the environment, it is extremely important to use the future in the present.

In order to meet the need to improve the competitiveness, the effectiveness of the vocational guidance system, and the development of the educational offer at the higher level, four institutions that are experts in various fields have joined forces to create an IT tool intended for use by career counselors and academic teachers for the purposes of vocational education and by students and graduates universities for the purposes of creating their own paths of professional development.

“Foresight-oriented IT system supporting higher education and career development (FORhesIT)” FORhesIT is a two-year project carried out by the Łukasiewicz Research Network - Institute for Sustainable Technologies (leader), Białystok University of Technology, IMD Pawelec Marcin, and the Norwegian Board of Technology, which benefits from a grant of EUR 148,620.00 received 85% from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway as part of the EEA Grants and 15% from Poland’s Government Budget.

Thanks to it, teachers, lecturers, trainers, management of educational institutions, and other persons active in the education sector will develop their professional competences by acquiring the skills to use the main result (IT tool) and its use in everyday educational activities and career counseling, as well as acquire skills thinking in terms of alternative scenarios for the future of the labor market and individual professional career.

FORhesIT will also contribute to the development of career counseling and mentoring by using a modern foresight approach to shaping alternative career paths and building scenarios for future-oriented labor market development, developing the ability to take into account weak signals and wild cards and other unprecedented events in the context of the future perception labor market, desired and required competences and skills.

FORhesIT, implemented from March 2022 to February 2024, is a continuation of the “Horizons of the Future” project, financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of the DIALOG programme, one of the results of which was the development of an IT tool (http://www.foresightscenarios.pl/).

For FORhesIT, this tool will be refined and complemented by a manual. The tool available in open resources will, on the one hand, be simplified and automated (in order to increase the accessibility for users who are not experts in the foresight methodology), and on the other hand - it will be enriched with an original, innovative set of foresight methods enabling the analysis of social, technological, economic and environmental factors, political, influencing the area of analysis of interest to users, i.e. the labor market, professional development, career path planning.

Project partners will develop three main intellectual outputs:

1. Foresight methodology for future-oriented labour market The foresight methodology developed for the implementation of the FORhesIT tool, focused on application in the context of analyzes of the future labor market, taking into account the description of methods (including STEEPVL, SWOT, trend analysis, scenario method), indicating the principles of their use and possible limitations, and examples of good practices. The methodology covers two levels of application by counselors and academic teachers:

• Individual level,
• Group level.

 2. An IT tool supporting the process of creating alternative career development scenarios FORhesIT IT tool, including:

• module for generating factors affecting the selected area of analysis in the selected time perspective;
• SWOT analysis module enabling the evaluation of previously identified factors in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats;
• scenario building module, enabling the assessment of STEEPVL factors.

3. A manual for users of the IT tool with scenarios of classes/workshops/individual sessions A manual enabling the correct use of the developed methodological and computer tools by user groups (i.e. lecturers, advisers, students, graduates), including, inter alia:

• detailed characteristics of all stages of the foresight scenario generation process using the FORhesIT computer tool;
• sample scenarios of workshops, individual sessions carried out with the use of the developed methodological and IT tools.

The FORhesIT tool, however, will be addressed not only for people related to career counseling or higher education but also for individual use by everyone who wants to analyze their career paths and personal development, e.g. by analyzing the required and desired skills within the generated scenarios.

We encourage you to follow the FORhesIT project on the website (https://forhesit.eu/) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/forhesit/). We also invite you to participate in the testing of the tool and dissemination events that will take place in the second half of 2023, both in Poland and Norway. For more information, please contact Remigiusz Mazur (Communication Manager of the FORhesIT Project): remigiusz.mazur@itee.lukasiewicz.gov.pl.