Page 78 - Professionalising-career-guidance-practitioner-competences-and-qualification-routes-in-Europe

‘Career guidance refers to services intended to assist people, of any age and at any point
throughout their lives to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage
their careers. Career guidance helps people to reflect on their ambitions, interests,
qualifications and abilities. It helps them to understand the labour market and education
systems, and to relate this to what they know about themselves. Comprehensive career
guidance tries to teach people to plan and make decisions about work and learning. Career
guidance makes information about the labour market and about educational opportunities
more accessible by organising it, systematising it, and making it available when and where
people need it.’
This definition helps to draw distinguishing lines between career guidance and other
professional tasks, but the project also needed to consider vertical or hierarchical
demarcation. Extensive work has been undertaken in other contexts to explore management
competences; such competences are not included within this framework. While distinctions
between practitioner tasks and management tasks (particularly when combined in the same
job role) will not always be clear-cut, they are, in general, easier to draw than the distinctions
between professional and supporting or paraprofessional roles. Distinctions can be guided
by the definition of guidance offered above; they are further considered in some of the
following sections. In general, if a task or activity contributes to career guidance as defined
above, it is included within this competence framework. Issues of which job roles are ‘within
scope’ need to be addressed if the competence framework is to be used to underpin the
assessment and accreditation of staff competence, but it is only one of many considerations
that come into play in that case. Some of these considerations are outlined in Section 7.

5.2.3. Client competences
One intended outcome of competent performance by a career guidance practitioner is that
the behaviour and competences – the career management skills – of their clients should be
developed. Several countries have undertaken work to define the competences needed by
people within or entering the workforce, that will enable them to manage their own career
effectively. Earlier work in the USA was extended in Canada to produce the blueprint for
life/work designs, which was in turn developed in Australia to produce the Australian
blueprint for career development (ABCD). In Ireland, an integrated set of development
projects, managed by the National Guidance Forum, produced the framework of
competences for guidance practitioners listed above and a national lifelong guidance
framework (National Guidance Forum, 2007) detailing the career competences needed from
early childhood to adulthood. There was also a consultative review of the perceptions of the
general public on guidance services, and quality in guidance, a quality-assurance framework
for guidance. (website addresses for these client competence standards are included in
Annex 3.)
These attempts to frame the competence needed by the individual student and citizen to
manage their own career development have an important contribution to make to the process
of defining the competences needed by career guidance professionals. In relation to the
parallel professional area of teaching, Roelofs and Sanders (2007) propose that ‘teacher
competence is reflected in the consequences of teachers’ actions, the most important being

68