Practice Areas
Employability and fair transition to work

ETF organised a peer learning event on career guidance standards on 2 February 2023. If you have missed it feel free to watch the recording and find PPTs below: Career guidance standards peer learning event - YouTube (recording of event).

Background

Quality in career guidance is influenced by system (e.g. legislation, collaboration and coordination mechanisms), provider (e.g. standards for providers) and practitioner capacity (e.g. practitioner qualification requirements, code of ethics), hence goes beyond the relation between practitioner and the client. Disposing of a solid quality assurance policy system ensures common quality standards of service delivery and allows for continuous, evidence-based improvement of career guidance practices and policies, increased financial accountability and transparency.

Quality assurance measures include (a) national standards, (b) labour market intelligence and careers information, (c) monitoring and evaluation of services and d) continuous improvement of the system. Given the importance of the topic of career guidance practitioner competences to the countries in the EU neighbourhood and Central Asia, as recent reviews showed, ETF decided to zoom the topic of standards for ensuring quality over the next years.

National standards include competence frameworks for practitioners, legally defined qualifications or licences, national register of professionals, accreditation of service providers, programme recognition frameworks, quality standards for services, ethical guidelines, guidelines for use e.g. of the internet in career development support as well as quality tools and methodologies which set the frame for common quality standards of service delivery. Non-existence of standards for career development support services is generally reflected in non-professionalised services, where the rule is the lack of clarity regarding roles, responsibilities and expected outcomes, resulting in a poor public image.

Fragmented standards for sectors or particular stakeholders is another challenge. Learning on the job is a widespread practice instead of well-defined competences of practitioners. Developing common standards for a diversity of providers and target groups is however challenging for many countries. Ethical and practice guidelines are a common means to ensure quality of service delivery, some include strong social agenda mandates in such guidelines, like Sweden. In most cases they are voluntary though and not linked to monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Upskilling and continuous professional development often also fail due to practitioner resistance, possibly due to a lack of legal provisions.

The definition of occupational standards for practitioners is therefore a key mechanism to assure the quality of services across providers, sectors and policy fields. All relevant actors including practitioners should be involved in their development. Also, national and international professional associations of practitioners play an important role in developing standards, in providing continuous professional development to practitioners and in supporting national practice and policy development, inter alia, through sharing good practice. To enable the development of common standards, Ireland for instance developed first shared principles of guidance like accessibility and impartiality to reach common ground amongst actors and only then derived standards and a quality assurance framework. However, there is no blueprint for standards and countries have to develop their context-sensitive approach, while learning from international practice is of great value to inform national standard development processes.

Objective of the event

The objective of the kick-off event in relation to this topic was to share experience on standards for career guidance – what they entail, how they can be developed, who to involve in the development, what they can be used for and what their added value is. We heared experts from

 

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