DIAMOND: Empowering Individuals to Shape Their Own Careers 🎯 | Universität Wien |

EA Editor November 5, 2026 DIAMOND
DIAMOND: Empowering Individuals to Shape Their Own Careers 🎯 | Universität Wien |
05 Nov 2026
DIAMOND
November 5, 2026 EA Editor

Empowering Individuals to Shape Their Own Careers: Short Reel featuring the University of Vienna

Traditional employment programmes often treat jobseekers as passive statistics within a wider economic system. True career independence and resilience, however, begin with individual agency. In our latest DIAMOND Empower Short Reel, Prof. Arnd Florack, Professor of Social Psychology at the Universität Wien, explains why putting people in the driver’s seat of their working lives is essential for building a modern, inclusive labour market.

The Psychology of Career Control

Skills training rarely delivers lasting results when people feel like passengers in their own professional journey. As Prof. Florack notes, the DIAMOND project plays a crucial role in helping and supporting individuals to gain real control over their own career paths. When people have the psychological confidence and practical support to navigate transitions, upskilling stops being a box-ticking exercise and becomes a tool for long-term autonomy.

Mapping Empowerment Capabilities

Within the DIAMOND consortium, the Universität Wien leads our work on collecting insights into empowerment capabilities. By investigating the psychological and social drivers that allow people to take ownership of their development, the Vienna team builds the scientific foundation for the ᴱGROW Index and the ᴱGROW Guidelines. This ensures that our personalised learning pathways and digital tools are grounded in how human beings actually learn, adapt, and make decisions.

From Grassroots Experience to Smarter Labour Policy

Individual motivation cannot thrive in a vacuum. It requires structural backing. Prof. Florack highlights the importance of developing targeted labour market policies that actively address these empowerment needs.

To ensure that our policy frameworks reflect everyday reality rather than academic theory alone, the Universität Wien has teamed up with our Grassroot Organisations across Europe to gather direct community insights. Through our Grassroot Living Labs approach, the consortium is currently running an international survey in six languages to hear directly from workers, jobseekers, and learners.

You can add your voice and help shape our research by taking the survey in your preferred language:

Watch the full short reel with Prof. Arnd Florack on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/eAmNDVWK2mo 

 

Discover more about our mission at https://diamond-empower.eu/.

Official Website of the EU-Horizon Project DIAMOND: https://diamond-empower.eu/ 

Consortium Partners:

  1. Aarhus Universitet (Coordinator)
  2. Freie Universität Berlin
  3. Universidad de Burgos
  4. Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
  5. Universität Wien
  6. CETIC
  7. Immersion
  8. European Centre for Economic and Policy Analysis and Affairs
  9. Evolutionary Archetypes Consulting SL
  10. Proportional Message Associacao
  11. Ente Morale Giacomo Feltrinelli per l’incremento Dell’Istruzione Tecnica
  12. Deinde Spolka Z Ograniczona Odpowiedzialnoscia
  13. Fundacja Obiektywna
  14. Youth Power Germany EV
  15. Fundación Miradas

Funding Agency: European Research Executive Agency (REA)

Project: 101178081 — DIAMOND — HORIZON-CL2-2024-TRANSFORMATIONS-01

Disclaimer: Funded by the European Union.

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA).

Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.