Careers information and e-recruitment

That is the claim of the Institute of Careers Guidance, the largest professional association for career guidance practitioners in the UK. It is a view supported by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills who recently said:

“The careers service has collapsed under Labour . . . and it helps explain the problems we’ve got with social mobility in this country. There is a massive information and advice problem here and it’s actually getting worse.”

That sounds like bad news for careers professionals everywhere. However, I would like to strongly argue in favour of the current Career Guidance community on two points. Firstly, the role of careers advisors is widely misunderstood and secondly that the problem lies, for the most part, not in the individual advisors or the information they impart but the system under which they must operate.

Careers advisors clearly cannot be responsible for each student’s particular career path. Rather, their advisory role is to facilitate the career progression and development of individuals. Students should be able to rely on careers advisors to help disseminate the wealth of information available and help them discover the options available along whichever path the student chooses to take.

How could a careers advisor possibly advise a student which career is best for them? That sort of service would require weekly one on one sessions over years which is obviously not an option.

I think the real problems lies in system under which careers advisors have to operate. In particular the connexions service, which is both disjointed and fragmented. Each local authority is responsible to providing the connexions service to young people in their area – there is very little national cohesion. As we have found with All About Law it is very difficult to inform all careers advisors of new or important resources meaning some advisors are much more equipped with the latest information that others. The result is that there are varying degrees in the quality coverage across the country.

There are hundreds of pieces of new information and developments across thousands of careers every week. It is simply not possible to keep up. What we really need is a joined up communication channel that careers advisors can plug into in order to point students in the right direction.

Once students are equipped with a good level of knowledge they can return to careers advisors to disseminate the information and ask for guidance in how that can be understood. The repetition of this process, ideally starting at 16, will steadily direct students on the best career path for that individual.

Ravi Chandiramani, from Children & Young People now is quite right in his view that, “all children and young people’s services – must be reshaped explicitly to support the young, right through from birth to 24”

Change is needed, but we are going to have to wait until May to see how that change will manifest itself. I just hope that whatever happens there is a strong central communication body formed to make sure society is informed of the role careers advisors play so expectations can be managed and to make sure information is neither patchy nor inconsistent.