Page 55 - Professionalising-career-guidance-practitioner-competences-and-qualification-routes-in-Europe

separated from social/personal counselling, will increase visibility and a separate
professional identity.
The situation is more mixed in the United Kingdom. Career guidance services in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland have been structured to provide all-age delivery, under
distinctive branding such as Careers Scotland and Careers Wales. Conversely, in England
the career guidance work with young people risks losing a distinctive identity, and work with
adults is undergoing further structural change which is likely to lead to redesign of services.
Several contributors to this study made reference to national classifications of
occupations, which, in some cases, were a relatively new development. Some contributors
mentioned that career guidance was not a formally recognised occupation in their country’s
classification of occupations: inclusion in such classifications could be an important step
towards recognition of career guidance as a distinct role in those countries where it is
emerging as such.
Other factors may militate against progress to a separate and distinctive profession. Until
now, in Portugal, most guidance and counselling psychology graduates serving the
education sector have been based in schools, although adopting a lifelong and life-wide
approach to their work. Consideration is now being given to placing these psychologists in
centres outside the school, elsewhere within their municipalities. Many of them consider this
a retrograde step as it distances them from their client group and makes access to their
services more difficult for the school-going population. In addition, previously their work
conditions were similar to teachers in schools; this has now changed and their weekly time
schedule has increased by a considerable percentage. A similar issue has arisen in
Romania, where a change of status for school-based career staff, proposed in a recent
education law, would involve loss of teachers’ conditions of employment (including generous
non-contact hours and holiday entitlements), and their replacement by a standard 40-hour
week and a smaller amount of paid holiday entitlement. Staff affected are contesting this
decision. Issues of employment status, and the professional identity of career guidance
practitioners, are frequently addressed by professional associations acting in the interests of
members, their clients and the profession generally. In some countries, such professional
associations have a long history; in others, new ones are being formed as increasing
numbers of people become engaged in career guidance practice.

3.6. Challenges in developing career guidance services

This section has explored a number of questions about the development of career guidance
services, particularly in relation to the staff resource that is essential to high quality in-service
delivery. There is encouraging movement, outlined in Section 2, towards more extensive
provision of specialised training at higher academic levels. However, such encouraging
movement is not universal, and there are a few examples of stasis or backward movement.
There remains scope for developing a broad Europe-wide consensus on an adequate
standard for specialised training for career guidance practitioners.
Teaching methods and course content offer much scope for development: in
labour-market and occupational knowledge, in effective use of practical training to gain (and
reflect on) first-hand experience and to develop skills, and in the use of diverse teaching

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