Page 236 - Working-and-ageing-Guidance-and-counselling-for-mature-learning

3062_EN_C1_Layout 1 11/23/11 4:22 PM Page 230

Working and ageing
230 Guidance and counselling for mature learners

This method ensures that the national qualifications system is able to offer
adult learners a range of qualification modalities that are convenient, flexible
and adjustable to the personal and professional life of each individual, but also
based on an organisational framework that allows for capitalisation of training
through modularity and complementarity between the different education-
training instruments. Guidance and counselling instruments and methods are
crucial. Today it is possible for each person to discover and define their own
best qualification pathway through adult life, with help from specialised
technicians at new opportunities centres. Diagnosis and guidance lead to a
negotiation process between advisors and candidates to ensure that each
individual can truly find the best qualifications solution.

12.4. Recognition, validation and certification
of competences

As a result of the diagnosis process described above, an adult may be referred
to a skills and competences recognition, validation and certification process,
or to an alternative qualification pathway. Skills and competences recognition,
validation and certification processes are developed solely at new
opportunities centres. Alternative qualification pathways are always developed
outside the centre, considering local supply and access criteria. In these
cases, guidance is defined by a personal qualification plan, which states the
training path that must be followed. Processes adopted by the national
qualifications system are based on tested models, while simultaneously
anchored in the latest and most innovative lifelong learning processes
discussed since around 2000 (Gomes and Capucha, 2010).
Validation of non-formal and informal learning becomes a pressing issue in
a society with low levels of formal education, such as Portugal. Experience
shows that low levels of formal education are not necessarily equivalent to a
lack of knowledge and skills. This is why validation of formal and informal
learning is high on the agenda, particularly in lifelong learning paradigms.
During adulthood, there are multiple situations and contexts in which a person
is creating and imagining ways of solving actual problems and thereby building
knowledge (Paiva Couceiro, 2002). Such knowledge can – and should be –
socially recognised and validated.
Validation models are relevant in rapidly ageing societies, such as the
European. Older adults have a wider range of acquired experiences and
knowledge that should be valued by society, and recognised in reference to