What are careers education and guidance? Are they the same thing? Why are they important? What are their benefits? Who is responsible for delivering them?

Careers guidance and Careers Education are mutually supporting – both essential, linked but different elements in the process of helping the individual (young person or adult) to make effective, successful and fulfilling career and educational decisions.
 
What is careers guidance?

Careers guidance is the process whereby a qualified guidance practitioner, through their professional skills, facilitates the development of an individual in terms of their personal decision-making about their future career, education and/or training. Most commonly, such interactions are on a one-to-one basis, should be confidential - and come about when the individual faces an important transition point in their life.

Such interactions may come about through a planned programme which anticipates when a pupil / student (or adult) is most likely to require this help (and in this way avoid crisis counselling) or it may come about when an individual perceives for themselves that they need help to make a decision and / or need information to help them implement a decision.

Careers guidance gives young people an opportunity to talk through their ideas in general and in detail before making potentially life changing decisions.

Its purpose is to help an individual to focus on their own choices, understand the implications of these, find answers to questions, resolve issues and make informed decisions.

It is vital that careers guidance is impartial – free from personal or institutional bias – and is informed by the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion.

Careers guidance is enhanced enormously if it is supported by psychometric profiling since this provides an objective basis from which to develop discussion. It also benefits hugely by being able to draw from a structured and substantial supporting careers education programme provided and delivered by the school or college.

Effective careers guidance involves:

• Establishing the young person’s starting point (the issue first presented by them may not be the real one they want or need to talk about).
• Helping the young person to explore his or her interests, abilities, personality, their values and potential.
• Supporting them in making relevant decisions
• Helping them identify possible ways forward
• Challenging any erroneous ideas they may have based on past experience, stereotypes, inaccurate self image, inaccurate information or hearsay – as well as discovering whether any ideas they have previously ignored or rejected may, after all, have real potential for them
• Confirming realistic possibilities taking into account the individual person’s capabilities and disposition as well as taking into account any other constraints including what is likely to be available
• Supporting the individual in developing a plan of action and implementing it

 

What are the key characteristics a careers guidance practitioner needs to demonstrate to be effective?

• Empathy
• Appropriate questioning techniques
• Encouragement
• Effective challenging
• Realism
• Ability to clearly summarise issues arising and action necessary and by whom?
• Detailed and up-to-date knowledge of appropriate careers education and training for the individual client

 

Benefits of careers guidance for pupils / students

Through effective careers guidance, a pupil or student will be in a better position to:

• Make more informed and thought through decision making
• Have better grounded career and educational ideas because they have been effectively challenged for realism
• Confidently move on to their chosen next stage through encouragement received and through clarification of objectives
• Recognise that there are frequently different routes to achieving a career or educational goal
• Provision of up-to-date and relevant information about appropriate careers and courses
• Clarification of career and educational objectives

 

Benefits of careers guidance for the school / college:

• Interaction with an outside guidance professional can provide a different perspective than that of a teacher
• Backup with detailed impartial knowledge on career and educational issues specific to individual pupils and beyond that readily held within a teacher’s repertoire
• Confidentiality issues allowing, the sharing of a different perspective on individual pupils
• Subject to the above, an insight into the motivations of different pupils
• Feedback on preferred learning styles thus enabling the teacher to adapt teaching approach accordingly
• Feedback on usual problem solving approach of individual pupils to aid adaptability of teacher approach in order to facilitate improved learning

 

 

What is careers education?

Careers education is an essential, planned programme of activities and learning experiences, usually delivered, substantially, by school staff (but frequently supported by the external, professional careers adviser). Its purpose is to help young people to develop the knowledge and skills they will need to make successful choices and manage transition at all stages of their life. This includes moving schools, moving to college, to university, into employment and even for potential career changes later on.

The external careers adviser, whilst not the main deliverer of a careers education programme, may make individual contributions at appropriate points within the programme and act in an advisory capacity. They may also suggest lesson plans and activities and contacts in support of teachers’ work in this area.

Normally, delivery of the careers education programme is headed up by a named careers teacher or co-ordinator in the school or college but, ideally, the programme is embraced by all members of the school’s staff who all have different roles they can play (as a minimum, subject teachers may, for example, wish to pass on the relevance to potential careers of their subject and discuss which other subjects combine well with theirs). It is ideal if the careers education programme is embedded in the school curriculum - sometimes as a strand within PSHE - but it may also take the form of a series of stand-alone sessions which may involve different contributions from school staff, external speakers and facilitators of workshop and may well involve the external careers guidance counsellor, at the very least in an advisory role. Work shadowing / experience, careers fairs and other extra curricular activities may also be set up.
  
Careers education has three curricular aims:

• Self-development - to help young people to understand themselves and the influences upon them, to build a record of their experiences and achievements and to develop their capabilities
• To provide the background whereby  young people learn to investigate and weigh up what opportunities are available to them at all stages of their progress through school and beyond
• To help young people to make and adjust their plans and to manage career choices , change and transition

 

The key component parts of Careers Education are:

Self awareness – what am I like? How do people perceive me? What are my interests? Do I have any special abilities?

Opportunity awareness – awareness of all the different options which may be appropriate including subject choices, vocational courses, training, degree and other higher education study and possible careers

Decision-making – developing the ability to make decisions about a variety of varyingly complex and important situations. This is a support throughout life and is beneficial for life situations generally as well as in relation to career and educational choices

Information – not only accessing relevant information but developing the necessary research skills to support this

Transitional Skills – developing the ability to effectively and comfortably adapt to new situations as they occur

Benefits of careers education for pupils / students

• Provides a framework of awareness, knowledge and skills to underpin their decision making throughout their various educational stages and beyond
• Provides an existing framework of the above within each pupil which a professional guidance professional can call on and bring to bear on specific career and educational decisions under discussion at any particular time
• Provides an early preparation for mature reflection on pupils’ individual futures
• Provides an additional medium of discussion away from subject considerations
• Develops skills of research (rather than pure dissemination of information) applicable to many life situations, not only those of careers and educational progression

 

 

Benefits of careers education for the school or college:

Careers education can greatly help the school or college by helping towards:

• Greater motivation of pupils/students through target setting
• More aware, socially skilled pupils/students which benefit school life generally
• An additional outlet for discussion and where issues can be raised
• Another perspective on a student rather than a purely academic one
• Identification of gaps in overall provision within the school / college
• Smoother progression of pupils / students through school/college and beyond with the benefit of lower drop-out rates
• Decisions being made based on a clearer appreciation of self
• Retention of appropriate students because they have thoroughly thought through the options