Our theme for November is guidance. Guidance has an important function for people in different phases of life. Guidance professionals are expected to help their clients navigate among the opportunities offered within basic vocational education or continuing education in a certain field, or to help them find a job that suits their competence profile. Another form of guidance is career guidance, which can entail giving advice to people wishing to make a longer-term career plan.
Thus, guidance deals with issues that are of strategic importance to many people – some of whom are going through radical life changes such as unemployment or transfer between studies and work. This broad spectrum is reflected in this issue’s articles, which cover various themes such as the difficulty of establishing guidance for adults, and the need for research on guidance.
The Danish article begins with an interview of Peter Plant about the report Expected outputs/outcomes of guidance services for adults in the Nordic countries. He points out that, while on the one hand there is insufficient research on the effects of guidance, on the other hand it is difficult to say anything about those results in the short term because they tend to become visible only in the long term.
The Finnish article describes the validation work done with immigrants at the adult education institution Adulta in Helsinki. The article stresses the importance of in-depth interviews during the competence-mapping phase while pointing out the difficulty of finding guidance counsellors with sufficient competence for conducting such interviews. In the Faroe Islands, adults’ right to guidance has become a political issue. At a time when unemployment has risen by 250% within a year and 80% of the unemployed have no post-comprehensive education, guidance is seen as a vital necessity.
The Icelandic article deals with a validation project where the focus is on competence acquired outside the formal education sector. The article illustrates the consequences of the project through Svanur, one of the participants, as well as giving an overview of what has been achieved so far. A similarity to the Finnish article can be detected – both articles make it clear that the guidance counsellor’s contribution is important in the process of mapping the individual’s experience. The Swedish article, too, deals with validation: it describes the validation work done at a company in Western Sweden and the network established for this purpose.
This issue’s final article comes from the Åland Islands and describes the current situation of guidance counsellors there – what kind of situations and organisations they work in and whether they are expected to have formal guidance qualifications. The article goes on to describe HAND, a competence development project implemented in 2001–2004 in order to enhance guidance competence for the contexts of studying and workplace-based learning.
I hope you enjoy this issue!