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Valuing diversity: guidance for labour market integration of migrants

4.5.1.3. Practitioner skills

Another fundamental aspect which influences the quality of practices is the
training of guidance practitioners who deal with migrants publics. To provide
useful information and advice, these professionals need to have sound
knowledge of information on integration procedures, legal and policy frameworks
related to integration, benefit schemes, labour market legislation, housing
legislation, access to health and social security. They also need to have the
necessary skills to deal with people from different cultures, with different values,
perceptions of the world and distinct ways of learning and expressing
themselves; these so-called multicultural skills include such diverse aspects as
fundamental knowledge of the other culture or the ability to listen intently.
Public administrations and training providers need to have specific concern
for the training of these professionals and create regulations which assure that
they have the correct set of skills. This is not currently the case across Europe.
Normally, multicultural training will be an integral part of practitioners training in
countries with an immigration tradition but progress has been uneven.
Most countries report that multicultural aspects are part of the training
curricula of any trained counsellor, although there are no specific binding
regulations and multicultural counselling is often not compulsory. At best, there is
endorsement of specific training for staff working with diverse client groups, as
frequently occurs in public employment services.
The most common arrangement seems to be the transfer of the
responsibility of assuring multicultural skills of practitioners to the entities that
provide their basic training, generally universities. The quality assurance
measure, in this case, is public services hiring policy which only admits qualified
counsellors with higher education degrees including multicultural training
(Denmark, Ireland, France, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland,
Portugal, Romania, Finland and the United Kingdom in Scotland) (Cedefop,
2009). At this level training is significant and sustained by a number of structured
approaches, following the same common principles discussed earlier.
All countries with high levels of immigration reported that most counsellors
that specifically deal with immigrants have had multicultural training, although it is
not always reported clearly when this training occurred and what were its
contents. In several cases this training was seen by experts as insufficient due to
limited development of both necessary knowledge contents and appropriate
skills.
For example, Spain, Italy and Austria reported on counsellor multicultural
training, although several limitations in the courses provided are mentioned by
experts: the knowledge base of trained counsellors about immigrant support

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