6.1 Lifelong career guidance

Lifelong career guidance

Information about skills and qualifications serves multiple purposes. For agile end-users, information is not necessarily in shortage, but it can be difficult to access and use. Learning to navigate in the torrent of information available and find what is essential, useful and reliable can be a challenge, especially for people with low readiness in career decision-making (Sampson & Osborn, 2014), less fluency with digital communication or difficult access to conventional guidance centres.

What is lifelong career guidance?

Career guidance services vary according to the context and operational models of the national education and public employment systems (PES). Different countries use diverse terms to describe these activities, such as educational and vocational guidance, career guidance and counselling or career counselling. To avoid ambiguity, the term guidance is used in this chapter to embrace any or all of these meanings. The term ‘lifelong guidance’ in parallel to ‘lifelong learning’ indicates the approach to providing such services on a lifelong basis. (ELGPN, 2015b). Lifelong guidance has been defined by the Resolutions of the Council of European Union (2004, 2008) as

“a continuous process that enables citizens at any age and at any point in their lives to identify their capacities, competences and interests, to make educational, training and occupational decisions, and to manage their individual life paths in learning, work and other settings in which those capacities and competences are learned and/or used.”

Careers information refers to any kind of information in any medium that assists citizens to make meaningful choices about learning and work opportunities. It includes information on occupations, the labour market, education, VET, higher education study programmes and pathways between these. The labour market (public and private employment services and employers) is a significant source of information on employment trends (supply and demand) in sectors, and on emerging and disappearing occupations. Labour market information (LMI), transformed into careers information, is critical for informed career decision-making (ELGPN, 2015b).

The European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network commissioned a study (Hooley, 2014) on the existing evidence of lifelong guidance, which concluded that lifelong guidance is most effective where it meets the set of features below.

These principles constitute a useful framework for enhancing the development of a consistent career development programme, which helps individuals to develop competences for effective search and use of information on skills and qualifications. A first step in this process is to transform this knowledge about efficacy into practice.

Further reading:

• Sampson, J. P., & Osborn, D. S. (2014). Using information and communication technology in delivering career interventions. In P. J. Hartung, M. L. Savickas, & W. B. Walsh (Ed.), APA handbook of career intervention, Volume 2: Applications (pp. 57-70). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/14439-005

• Hooley, T. (2014). The Evidence Base on Lifelong Guidance. A Guide to Key Findings for Effective Policy and Practice. ELGPN Tools No.3. Saarijärvi, Finland

• ELGPN [European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network]. (2015b). The Guidelines for Policies and Systems Development for Lifelong Guidance: A Reference Framework for the EU and for the Commission. ELGPN Tools No. 6. Saarijärvi, Finland.