As a part of the project’s activities, all the partners, in their respective countries have collected data about the vocational preferences and need for vocational information, of approximately 800 middle and high school students. Students from Portugal, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria expressed that they believe it´s very important to get more information to choose a career path and that they usually get this information, primarily, from the internet, followed by their parents and contacting with professionals. Thus, validating an important premise of the G-Guidance project of using a digital web-based platform as a preferential way to transmit vocational information for students to explore and have the opportunity of making more informed and efficient career decisions.

Results from our study also show that for our students, the parents are still identified as having a significant role in their career choice. A big percentage of the students says that their career decisions are going to be done by their parents, which reinforces the importance, not only of conducting career guidance at schools, to empower students to make their career choices based on their own judgment, rather than letting their parents do them, and also to inform and include, as much as we can, the parents, on their children’s career decisions. G-Guidance project aims to design a career guidance process to address this issue, using a digital, web-based platform, that can be used by parents to follow-up their kid’s career guidance and development and participating in selected activities that will be part of the platform’s gamified activities.

The results from the questionnaires applied to 800 students across Portugal, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria, show some significant differences between countries. For example, while in Bulgaria and Italy and Greece there’s a balance between choosing to get a job right after finishing high school and wanting to continue studying to university level, in Portugal, students showed a significantly higher percentage of students that would rather get a job after finishing high school than the other countries. At the same time, Spanish students have a significant (much) higher percentage of students, that would rather continue studying in universities, than getting a job right after finishing high school.

Across Portugal, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria, students have shown a bigger interest in the professional fields of Health, Education, Engineering, Computer Science, Marketing and Design, as areas where they see themselves working in the future. At the same time, the fields of Agriculture, Costumer Service, Construction, Logistics/Transports and Industry, where the least preferred for the students. In this aspect, there were significant differences among countries, with Computer Sciences more popular in Portugal and Bulgaria, Education more popular in Spain and Italy,

and Tourism in Italy, among other variations. Health-related professions were the only professional field unanimously preferred by the students of all countries