EmployID

The EmployID project aims to support professional identity transformation in public employment services (PES) across Europe. To achieve this, the project employs a variety of approaches:

• Reflection (our work on linking reflection and professional identity transformation)
• Networking
• Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Peer coaching

The project’s website provides a more detailed explanation of both the project’s objectives and the underlying theory of professional identity transformation. 

The project works closely with various employment agencies across Europe. Three organizations are full members of the project: DWP (in the UK), ZRSZ (in Slovenia), and HZZ (in Croatia).

Clausthal University of Technology leads the work package on reflection, peer coaching, and creativity.

Using ethnographic methods, we conducted work observations, workshops, and interviews at various employment agencies across Europe to understand the work context and identify potential entry points for supporting professional identity transformation. Ultimately, we decided to design a modular Community of Practice platform. The platform is intended to support the emergence of a community of practice and, through additional features, also facilitate (collaborative) reflection in the workplace. We base our understanding of reflection on the work of Boud, who defined reflection as returning to past experiences and re-evaluating them in order to develop new perspectives or behaviors for future actions.

Reflective Learning Cycle by David Boud (1985)

From an employer’s perspective, supporting reflection is often desirable, as it allows employees to reflect on their own activities and practices and learn from them. Therefore, our Community of Practice platform explicitly supports the steps associated with (collaborative) reflection, such as the exchange of experiences and joint discussion to learn from those experiences, so that less effective approaches can be improved and good practices maintained and supported.
We have therefore enriched the Community of Practice platform with various features to support reflection, which we ultimately refer to as a reflective Community of Practice platform:

• Display of prompts on various aspects of (collaborative) reflection (concept paper)
• Support for asking questions
• Flagging high-quality contributions
• Etc.

All of the features mentioned are designed as small plug-ins that can be easily turned on and off. This allows us to achieve a high degree of adaptability and configurability of the platform to the diverse needs of the employment agencies in the project.

The homepage features a wide variety of information about recent happenings within the community: recently posted news, topics, and posts that have been marked as particularly helpful. At the bottom of the homepage, we display a prompt encouraging users to share their experiences on the forum. 

When users are creating a forum post—for example, to share personal experiences—prompts are also displayed. These suggest different ways to structure the post or what else can be added to it. Further down, we make it easier for users to ask predefined and custom questions in the forum. Asking questions is a proven method of supporting reflection [Zhu 1996].

We have developed a map plugin to help users visualize the personal network they have built within the community. It displays information about which other users they have interacted with in discussions, who has responded to their posts, which users have marked their posts as helpful, and so on. In addition, this plugin can also show which topics are being discussed most actively in which regions. These features are designed to make it easier for users to explore the community. The plugin was created as part of a master’s thesis, and an evaluation in a workplace context is still pending. 

This plugin visually represents the role you play in the forum: whether you are primarily a reader or someone who actively posts content. The long-term goal of this plugin is to help users move from the periphery of the community toward its core (based on the concept of peripheral participation by Lave & Wenger, 1999). The plug-in is designed to make it easier for users to join the discussion. Users receive prompts based on their role, with suggestions on how to participate in the community. The plugin was developed as part of a bachelor’s thesis and is currently being further developed.

The evaluation of textual contributions or the detection of reflection, e.g., in online forums, is only possible to a limited extent through the mere collection of numerical data such as post length. For the evaluation, we created a scheme for manual content analysis of reflection, which allows researchers to mark specific text segments with aspects of reflection (e.g., concrete references to one’s own experiences, which is one of the core concepts of reflection). Work on this coding scheme began in the MIRROR project (http://mirror-project.eu) and has now been continued in EmployID (see Prilla et al., Prompting users to facilitate support needs in collaborative reflection, 2015). The long-term research goal here is automated content analysis (for example, using tools such as LIWC, or approaches in the field of machine learning), which can then assist in providing real-time support to users. Support can then be provided automatically, dynamically, and personalized by a system and can also be scaled for large user groups.

If you are interested in our reflective Community of Practice platform or in text content analysis, please contact us. We would be happy to provide demo access to the platform!

The EmployID project is funded by the European Commission (No. 619619)