Thursday, September 12, 2013

Leap Is Going Off Air

The idea for the Look Before You Leap: Self Employment Survival Strategies project emerged from our passion for helping career development practitioners explore career options beyond government funded programs which, for many, included work as career consultants. We also wanted to ensure career development practitioners gained an increased awareness of self-employment, helping them to support clients. Our work on the project was supported by our 20+ years of self-employment endeavors and our awareness that many leap into self-employment relatively uninformed and unprepared.

The Leap project was made possible thanks, in large part, to funding received from the Canadian Education and Research Institute for Counselling (CERIC). Project deliverables included a 2-week facilitated e-learning course focused on self-employment, a corresponding workbook useful for those considering self-employment and those supporting self-employed persons, and a research article published in the Canadian Journal of Career Development (available at: http://ceric.ca/cjcd/current/v11-n1/look_before_you_leap.pdf) The project’s final report is available at: http://www.ceric.ca/?q=en/node/325.

Having launched in 2010, the project agreement has now come to an end and the Life Strategies team has decided it is time to wrap up all remaining activities. We are thrilled to announce that the PDF version of the Leap workbook will now be available for free – click here to download.

The Leap website will remain live for the foreseeable future, but will not be updated. Don’t hesitate to visit as the site includes links to many useful resources.

The Leap Blog will also remain live, but we won’t be contributing new posts.

The Twitter feed will also go silent; our last Tweet has been set for September 2013 and the account will close soon after.

Our team is still passionate about supporting career development practitioners interested in self-employment, either for themselves or for their clients. Do not hesitate to connect if you’d like more information on customized training options.

Huge thanks to CERIC, Leap students, and research participants for your support of this project. We also want to thank Miranda Vande Kuyt for managing the Leap site, blog, and Twitter feed, and for teaching the Leap course, over the last few years. We also can’t forget our project coordinator, Cassie Saunders; without her support our self-employment endeavours would be infinitely more challenging!

Cheers,

Roberta and Deirdre