CARE: Career advancement, Resilience & Employability of Sport Coaches

ongoing

The CARE (Career advancement, Resilience & Employability of Sport Coaches) project aims to develop career guidance for sports coaches so that they can develop their professional skills, deliver better coaching and create better careers for themselves. Global megatrends and changing working life increase demands for coaches to maintain their employability and continuously develop their skills. In the field of sport coaching, sector-specific factors like diverse educational backgrounds, varied working arrangements, and the risks of redundancy and job termination further highlight this necessity. The low number of female coaches and their dropout rates are significant challenges. Urhea Olympic training centre, Varala Sports Institute and Umea University share interest in helping professional coaches to develop their careers and employability though career guidance and designed CARE to improve career guidance for sport coaches. To ensure a sport club perspective, 2 sport clubs, Labod Bled Skating Club from Slovenia and Tampereen Pyrintö from Finland, were identified to share the common development interest and were invited to be the partners of CARE. The main target groups of CARE are professional coaches and sport clubs who employ the coaches. Specific objectives of CARE are: 1) Co-create new knowledge on career guidance for sport coaches that meets the needs of future working life, 2): Co-create recommendations for modern career guidance for sport coaches, 3) Support the career and skill development of coaches and sport clubs, 4) Improve participants' ability for international co-operation. CARE will increase the inclusion and diversity of coaches by building opportunities for coaches from different backgrounds to build coaching careers for themselves. Among the specific priorities in the field of sport, the project will focus on promoting education in and through sport. In particular, the project will focus on priority (e) promoting employability through sport.