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4.2.7. Professional identity

Three factors contribute to raising awareness of career guidance as a specialist profession,
one being inclusion in the national system of professions and occupations. The second is the
considerable coverage achieved through the national newspaper, which has widened the
awareness of the general public as well as those in related professional areas. The third is the
establishment of a new national professional association, the National Association of Career
Counsellors, initiated and actively supported by the team which led the GCDF implementation
programme.

4.3. Denmark

4.3.1. Summary
In recent years, Denmark has changed the structures through which much of its career
guidance provision is delivered. Subsequent changes have increased the extent of academic
training for career guidance practitioners and created a more distinctive professional identity
for career guidance.

4.3.2. Policy and legislative initiatives
A Danish ‘guidance reform’ took place in 2004. School-based career guidance teachers were
abolished and replaced by guidance specialists in cross-municipal youth guidance centres,
known as Ungdommens Uddannelsesvejledning (UU), and by higher education guidance
centres, known as Studievalg. The changes followed a number of influential national and
international studies which were conducted in the early 2000s, including Denmark’s
participation in the OECD review (2004) and a national report on the state of career
guidance. Both strongly criticised the perceived lack of professionalism among guidance
counsellors. The 20 different, but parallel, training routes at that time, most within educational
guidance, were seen as representing duplication and lacking coordination: this constituted a
waste of resources, as much of this training (up to 400 hours, but most much shorter) was
conducted on a peer-learning basis and was of varied quality. An exception to this was the
(now) Danish University of Education, which trained career guidance teachers within a
nationally acknowledged curriculum framework at diploma level.

4.3.3. Diploma-level training
From 2004, almost all these different training routes were replaced by a single basic training
diploma-level course for guidance practitioners across most sectors (originally 30 ECTS
points, later lengthened to 60 ECTS points (see Figure1)). This training route now attracts
some 200 students per year, and is offered at six regional university colleges: they represent
slightly different courses, but within the same centrally-issued curricular guidelines.
This level of competences became compulsory by law for guidance practitioners in UU
and Studievalg, but only after some years of lobbying. Key players in developing the training
include the Ministry of Education, the regional university colleges (which provide the
training), the Danish Joint Council of Associations in Educational and Vocational Guidance

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