KoKiVa - Youths’ educational interest and choices: reducing field-specific gender segregation with work life visits

This project

1) Develops schemes for local and remote working life visits by upper secondary school students and constructs a new electronic platform for the implementation of working life visits. The platform will enable increasingly flexible and more broadly scalable working life visits in the various lessons and supports the linking of the various school subjects to working life.

2) The platform will be constructed to support the development of current visiting structures so that groups of students can visit workplaces, and representatives from working life can visit classes in schools, in a more coordinated fashion than before, making use of the centralised reservation system offered by the platform.

3) The project offers training for teaching staff (also including guidance counsellors) and representatives from working life for the planning, implementation and evaluation of visits.

4) The project selects pilot target groups to further develop the scheme for working life visits.

The key thing is to develop the quality of working life visits, to assess their functionality, and to compose training sessions for teaching staff and representatives from working life to implement effective working life visits. The working life visits are primarily constructed to reduce gender-based differentiation of working and educational careers. The teaching staff and representatives of working life are offered training about gender bias in different fields and its consequences. For the pilots to be implemented as part of the project, representatives are selected from the a) male-dominated field of technology and b) female-dominated field of teaching and education, both of which also have a labour shortage in this region.

The goal is to create indicators to monitor and develop the efficiency of the visits: has the implementation of a visit been pedagogically prepared with due consideration of the knowledge level of a young person, and can different visits offer more varied perspectives and diminish gendered ideas of the options available in the various fields. The purpose of these training sessions is to guide the teaching staff and representatives from working life to observe gender-sensitive methods of guidance that can encourage young people to find their way to a line of work based on their strengths and interests rather than gender. We also explore how a working life visit can have an impact on capability beliefs or study motivation, and estimate whether a working life visit brings relevance to the subjects studied by a young person.