The 2021 Career Development Institute Student Conference Scotland takes place (online) today. Organised collaboratively by the Career Development Institute, Edinburgh Napier University, University of the West of Scotland, and Skills Development Scotland (SDS), the conference theme is ‘Responding to COVID-19: changing labour markets, changing practice’. The Conference Chair is Dr Pete Robertson of Edinburgh Napier University.

Amongst the expert keynote speakers and workshop presenters are two of the ESRC-SDS-funded PhD student students from the Centre for Social Informatics: Katherine Stephen and Marina Milosheva.

Katherine Stephen & Marina Milosheva, ESRC-SDS funded PhD students

Katherine will be speaking at the conference about metaskills. Metaskills are a priority area for SDS, as noted in the paper Skills 4.0 published in 2018. They are also the main theme of Katherine‘s PhD. Katherine will speak about the progress to date on her doctoral study with particular reference to metaskills definitions and development, and the methods that she is deploying to assess and evidence metaskills in her empirical work.

Marina‘s contribution to the conference is entitled ‘Co-creation of knowledge in career development: Innovation in the face of change’. She will be presenting the findings of the study on career knowledge co-creation amongst SDS career practitioners that she completed as part of her MSc(R) last year. Marina will draw attention to the importance of socialisation, information behaviours, and technology use in career knowledge co-creation, and to the relevance of the findings of this small-scale research project to policy. Marina’s slides can be accessed from Google drive. [Update 27th February 2021: Marina has written a blog post about her presentation at the conference, and the discussion points that followed her talk.]

To keep an eye on the event remotely, please follow the hashtag #CDIScotConf.