Guidance for a meaningful life

There is currently a general consensus on the need for the development of more professional career guidance services in Malta, and while much still has to be achieved, the prospects in this regard nevertheless look promising.

There are various settings in which career guidance is offered: in compulsory and post-16 educational institutions, at the Employment and Training Corporation, and informally, within unions and to a lesser extent within some companies through their HR departments.

In the education sector, personal rather than career guidance tends to predominate, though it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the two. Increasingly it is being felt that staff trained specifically in the provision of career guidance should be made available to schools.

These could be involved in delivering, or assisting in the delivery of, the school-to-work curriculum, an area which is dealt with at some length in the National Minimum Curriculum. But there are various other potential users of career guidance services that are not being adequately catered for.

These include out-of-school youth, for instance, as well as persons with disability who, though they might have access to sheltered workshops, do not have specialised guidance services that cater for their specific needs.

Similarly, there is little, if any, guidance support for adults in employment - at best trade unions offer guidance informally, while private employment services focus on job brokerage and head hunting. Community-based guidance is underdeveloped, a point that has been well made by the Malta response to the consultation exercise on the Commission's Lifelong Learning Memorandum.

Career guidance traditionally targeted young people. Today, however, the notion is that guidance services should be available throughout life, in order to assist adults manage non-linear career paths and to make the best of the opportunities available to them in the national and Europe-wide market.

Today's job market is increasingly marked by insecurity and citizens and workers should have a right to transparent, reliable, up-to-date, and easily accessible information that helps them identify the alternative pathways available, and advice when needed.

As in many European countries, such adult career guidance services in Malta tend to be narrowly targeted towards the unemployed, when in fact many adults who wish to change jobs, or to move upwards or sideways in their occupation, might also wish to have access to information and/or advice.

Offering such comprehensive guidance services is a big challenge, but the motivation should be there on the part of all social partners, as citizens should have the opportunity to develop meaningful work lives. This not only leads to personal development and fulfilment but can also have a positive impact on productivity. In the case of younger people, having clear career plans can also have a major positive impact on motivation to learn.

Ronald G. Sultana, Professor of Educational Sociology and Comparative Education at the University of Malta, recently wrote the "European Training Foundation Review of Career Guidance Policies in 11 Acceding and Candidate Countries", and the CEDEFOP monograph "Guidance Policies in the Knowledge Society: Trends, Challenges and Responses across Europe", a synthesis report on 29 European countries, including Malta.

CEDEFOP is the European Commission Agency for Vocational Education and Training and is based in Thessaloniki. Professor Sultana also directs the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research (EMCER) at the University of Malta. He practised as a counsellor in educational institutions (in Malta, UK and New Zealand) and researched vocational education and training as well as schoolwork transition issues in Malta, England, France, New Zealand, Portugal and the US, where he was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University.

At a seminar on career guidance, recently organised by the Reggie Miller Foundation at the Crowne Plaza, Sliema, Professor Sultana spoke about the importance of guidance and made a presentation on the theme "Lifelong Guidance: Towards a National Strategy".

He paid tribute to the pioneers who launched guidance and counselling in Malta in the late Sixties and argued that field and guidance practitioners have to face a set of new challenges. These challenges were not unique to Malta, as the "ETF Review of Career Guidance Policies in 11 Acceding and Candidate Countries", showed.

One major advantage for service providers is that they have a comparative/analytical database on career guidance which shows how several other European countries are taking initiatives to meet these challenges. There has indeed been a major policy debate around the provision of career guidance, with the European Commission setting up a Lifelong Guidance Expert Group, that has developed benchmarks of good practice.

Professor Sultana and Professor Tony Watts, both members of this Expert Group, have also co-authored a policy manual that will be jointly published by the European Commission and by the OECD, to assist key decision-makers in their search for answers to shared problems.

"We should not look at career guidance services from the point of the providing institution, but rather we should give more importance to the users of the service," Professor Sultana said. Goals for the Malta report included a review of where we stood, in view of the challenges of lifelong learning, considering the European context, learning from good practice elsewhere to help develop a policy focus and promoting better practice in the field.

What is guidance? The most common definition is a set of services intended to assist individuals and groups of any age, at any point throughout their lives, to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage their careers.

Guidance can be offered in education and training institutions, companies, and voluntary and private organisations. The service can be offered face to face or even at a distance. Professional guidance should include career information, assessment tools, interviews, career management information, work tasters and transition services. Why invest in guidance?

Guidance fosters social inclusion and creates equal opportunities for everyone. It helps lifelong learning and sustains employability. "Career guidance is not only a private good but also a public good in a society that is increasingly marked by risk and insecurity", Professor Sultana said.

One of the tough challenges career guidance has to face is that of providing information about labour market trends. Forecasting which jobs are likely to be needed is quite difficult, particularly for small and vulnerable economies. However, closer linkages between education and the labour market sectors can help send reasonably clear signals as to where the employment opportunities are likely to increase, and where they are likely to dry out.

Another key challenge is the provision of an integrated and consolidated database about occupations, which young people and adults can access over the Internet. To meet these and other challenges, there needs to be clear policy steering in Malta, Professor Sultana said. As it is, such a policy framework in relation to career guidance and career information still needs to be developed, and as a consequence, there is limited cross-sectoral collaboration.

More determined leadership in the field can be ensured via three key mechanisms, namely legislation, quality standards and evidence-based monitoring. All three are in dire need of development. While the Ministry of Education has made a commitment to policy development in the field, through the setting up of a policy unit focusing on career guidance, other initiatives to drive the field forward are being planned by the National Guidance Forum, which is due to be launched on December 15.