Page 43 - valuing-diversity-guidance-for-labour-market-integration-of-migrants

Valuing diversity: guidance for labour market integration of migrants

Preventive measures are fundamental to avoiding unnecessary stress and
personal sufferance. In general, they require solid knowledge of the client’s family
and community network to help him/her find anticipatory strategies to eventual
integration problems which may arise.
The degree of acculturation, in its turn, affects the way in which methods can
be applied. Conventional counselling methods can have little, or even negative,
effect on immigrants with little notion and experience of the receiving country’s
culture and systems. The counsellor’s role can be substantially affected by the
extent to which he/she can mobilise the client’s knowledge of the culture or
his/her personal networks in the country. For example, if the counsellor can enlist
his/her client onto relevant local professional networks, he/she can help the
individual devise a career plan which makes use of such networks.
A distinctive and common element of roles in multicultural counselling is the
need to reach out beyond the local culture and conventional guidance networks,
normally associated with the physical place and institution in which guidance is
being provided. It is not only methods and practitioner training that need to be
adapted to cultural diversity; guidance activities themselves need to have
stronger links with complementary services and with clients’ personal networks.
The cultural adaptation of methodologies – especially those for testing and
assessment – and the development of multicultural competences among
practitioners are potential ways to improve the quality of the services provided.
Also, the development of outreach activities is, in many cases, a way of making
the service more valuable to individuals, organisations and society by addressing
contextual factors that hinder an individual’s career development.
By adapting them to client needs and to the target group cultural
characteristics, on a meso level, these methods introduce improvements in
several stages of the value-added chain of guidance activity, by refining the
inputs (counsellor skills, assessment methods), improving processes (achieving
better cooperation among stakeholders, generating successful client
involvement, implementing quality assurance mechanisms) and following-up on
its outcomes.
Graph 3 shows a synthetic diagram that connects the generation of value by
career services for individuals with a process level depiction of a value-added
chain for guidance activities.

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