Career guidance needed 'throughout life'

Maltese university lecturer Ronald Sultana has written a report for the EU on career guidance policies and trends across Europe, where the service is increasingly seen as being important throughout life rather than just for secondary school students or the unemployed.

The report was drawn up for the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, which helps the European Commission, member states and social partner organisations across Europe make informed choices about vocational training policy.

The report gives an overview of career guidance systems in 29 countries including Malta, allowing policy makers and practioners to review their own systems in the light of the experiences and intitiatives of different countries.

Prof. Sultana, who is the director of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research and a member of the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta, wrote a report last year on the career guidance system in Malta (see The Times, January 2, 2004).

He found that the services offered locally to students and adults suffer from the lack of a clear policy to steer them and from fragmentation. Targets, measures to attain them and the monitoring of progress were "largely absent". Despite the existence of some forward-looking initiatives, he argued that clear leadership must be provided if the services are to come up to the standards being striven for internationally.

His latest report gives a good indication of what those standards are.

Summarising trends in Europe, he says career guidance is moving from being a service aimed mostly at students and the unemployed to a mainstream service that caters for all learners and those making career moves. The service is increasingly becoming one that is not just provided at key decision or crisis points, but throughout life, giving people the skills of learning and career management.

Increasingly, guidance is not offered only by the state and within institutions, but also by organisations such as trade unions and employers, and is being made available at leisure sites, in the community and in the home.

From a service staffed by non-specialised personnel, pre- and in-service training is now becoming an important requirement.

The service is also starting to use ICT to connect education and labour market data.

Despite the general progress taking place in Europe, some key shortcomings are identified. Provision, not just in Malta, is still largely segmented, "a motely collection of services offered in an unconnected manner at different times to different client groups at different points in the life course".

Prof. Sultana calls for stakeholders to join forces and to see guidance provision as a whole system, so that it would become "a seamless flow of services that are linked, coherent, meaningful, accessible and useful, and to be drawn upon and made use of, in different ways, as he or she negotiates pathways through life".

Provision for adults in employment and for senior citizens remains limited if non-existent, while a paradigm shift to lifelong guidance would require broader and deeper training of practitioners, as well as better quality assurance, says the report.