FutureLab+: A Digital Pathway for School-Based Career Guidance: An Exploratory Pilot Study

Abstract

Career guidance is increasingly challenged by educational, technological and labour market transformations that require more flexible and personalized approaches to supporting students’ career development. Although vocational interest assessment remains a central component of guidance practices, traditional self-report measures may not fully capture how students approach complex situations and career-related decisions. This study pre-sents FutureLab+, a digital experiential career assessment platform inspired by Holland’s RIASEC model that integrates vocational interests with behavioural information generated through simulated activities. An exploratory pilot design was adopted, including an internal testing phase to refine the platform and a pilot implementation involving 21 students from IIS Confalonieri in Campagna. The assessment pathway combined a vocational interest questionnaire with five experiential missions designed to explore reasoning, creativity, collaboration, organizational skills, problem solving and decision-making processes. Pre-liminary findings indicate that the platform generated differentiated guidance profiles by integrating self-reported interests with behavioural indicators emerging from experiential tasks. The resulting reports provided multidimensional representations of students’ voca-tional orientations and personal resources. Given the exploratory nature of the study, further research with larger samples is required to examine the reliability, validity and edu-cational contribution of experiential digital approaches to career assessment and guidance.