GUIDE. – Case Studies as an Innovative Cross-Cultural Training Material for Guidance Practitioners

General description                          

With the increasing importance of flexible labour markets and the need of individuals to prepare themselves to changes; educational and career guidance is becoming more and more an important of lifelong learning. There is clear consensus in Europe that high quality guidance and counselling is a key component and helps to bring more people into jobs and training and thus, ultimately supports economic and social well-being. (Professionalizing career guidance – Practitioners competences and qualification routes in Europe; Cedefop panorama series; 164). With the focus on the guidance practitioners it means that adequately trained career guidance practitioners are a prerequisite for making high quality guidance service provision a reality for every European citizen.

The CEDEFOP defines a clear need in Europe for training for guidance practitioners. But despite on-going efforts from CEDEFOP with its leading institutional in lifelong guidance, the current training provision in Europe is still very diverse. Training may be mandatory or optional, systematic or ad-hoc, and at any level from short uncertified courses to master´s degrees. Furthermore, the working setting like the education sector, the public employment sector or other specialized organizations are differing from each other and other professionals also play a significant role in helping individuals with their career plans and choices, e.g. social workers. A similar picture emerges if one focuses on teaching methods and course contents for guidance practitioners.

Methodology

The distribution of tasks between partners is made following the different roles they play and also considering the experience and knowledge for each of them.

In order to attain the aims of the project, it is divided into seven different workpackages. Workpackages 3, 4 and 5 comprise the substance of the work project: research activities aimed at obtaining the necessary data; development of activities to create training material and the pilot phase that ensures the quality of this material. Workpackages 6 and 7 ensure the dissemination of the project and the exploitation of the results. Workpackages 1 and 2 ensure on one hand, the general management of the project and on the other hand, quality and assessment of the development of the project and its results.

Each workpackage is led by an organization that is responsible of coordinating the set of activities corresponding to that workpackage. Furthermore, a plan of workpackages guides the work to be done. It also provides information on planned activities, deadlines, basis, responsibilities, and final results.

In addition, it is also included the methodology to be used in each workpackage as well as communication strategies, quality guarantee, assessment proposal, qualitative research design, dissemination activities selected and finally, the exploitation strategy selected for the results selected according to functionality and effectiveness criteria.

Aims

With this project we want to contribute to the 2008 EU Council resolution on better integration of lifelong guidance into lifelong learning strategies, Our contribution is related to one small part of this huge area. We focus on the guidance practitioner themselves. Our interest in the planned project to answering the following question: “What makes a guidance process successful from a guidance practitioner perspective and what are the skills which have to be developed and/or strengthened for answering these needs?”

So our aim is to enrich the debate on continuous professional development of guidance practitioners – from their own guidance practitioner perspective.

In order to achieve it, we identified the following two objectives, which have to be implemented with concrete activities carried out in the projects work packages.

(1)The identification of the most important needs for a successful guidance process from a guidance practitioners´ perspective and the resulting skills and competences, to be developed, respectively, to be strengthened.

Guidance practitioners are the experts and they are a prerequisite for making high quality guidance service provision a reality for every European citizen. They will have ideas about relevant work situations which trainees must learn to master increasingly well. The logic that follows from this is obvious. We ask themselves about the most important needs for a successful guidance process. The have specific knowledge of the reality of the world of work. With the aim of fulfilling this objective we can give recommendations to different fields and stakeholders, e.g. the quality in vocational and further training programmes for guidance practitioners, but also to policy makers on the different levels. In the end this gives also valuable information on the professional identity of guidance practitioner themselves.

(2) The development of training material, which develops and strengthens the needed skills and which can be used from guidance practitioners in different roles and in different settings.

This objective is addressed to the diverse picture which can be drawn to the current situation in different terms related to vocational and educational guidance, e.g. vocational and further training programmes, specific working situation and teaching methods and course content for guidance practitioners. 

This huge variation cannot only be found in Europe but also in the countries of the project partners. The training material to be developed considers this specific situation and will be usable regardless of guidance settings, guidance arenas and guidance approaches.

Target audience

• People at a disadvantage to access the labour market
• People threatened by social exclusion
• Advice professionals.
• Consultants.