Our Future Skills Centre-funding research project, Virtual Skills for Career Development Practitioners, is at full force this week with the start of our new research assistants. Welcome to Erica Thomson and Bennett King-Nyberg!

The research team, overseen by Dr. Roberta Borgen, has already started compiling articles for the literature review, and the researchers are learning everything they can about the sector.

This week I had an opportunity to address the BC Career Development Association board of directors and share the work we are doing. I was delighted to hear their offers of help to get the word out about the research project by helping us find more respondents from other areas of practice to respond to our online survey. My very ambitious goal is to receive 500 completed survey responses which would provide us with a substantial data set to support our findings. This project is a community-based project where those Career Development Professionals delivering services directly to the clients are the experts and have the opportunity for their voices to inform policy. Along with our project partners, Ethos Career Management Group, and our Virtual Learning Consortium, made up of practitioners from nine ASPECT member organizations, we will collect evidence to inform sector interventions and government funding decisions.

To those 9 CDPs from our learning consortium, you can expect to receive an invitation to our first meeting very soon. To all of you who will be participating through the online survey and/or the focus groups, we will keep you posted on our progress every week in Aspectives news. It's an exciting time, and we are moving a million miles an hour, but I am so excited to be doing this research on behalf of the sector. 

Janet Morris-Reade
ASPECT CEO