Education

Getting advice on possible   careers  to investigate or consider is extremely important at any age. During a  student’s high school years, it is crucial to begin getting an idea what interests them. The earlier an individual can decide what area of academic  study he or she will follow, the better decisions made to secure a happy and  rewarding career choice. 

http://www.yepod.com/?p=15911 

Pass it on,

Dr Anthony  

This article titled “Can online careers advice work?” was written by Louise Tickle, for The Guardian on Friday 21st October 2011 22.02 UTC

Margaret-Anne Mackenzie left school in April without any qualifications. “I didn’t get any careers advice at school,” the 16-year-old says. She’s not alone – one in four 15- to 19-year-olds said the same in a survey published recently by vocational qualifications provider City & Guilds.

The teenager, who cares for her mother in sheltered accommodation, has also had to cope with the recent disruption of a move from Scotland to south Wales, which left her feeling “quite scared” of starting out again in a new place where she had no friends or contacts.

But Mackenzie may have just got lucky, because at a summer drop-in session run by the Newport Careers Centre, she was linked up with a personal careers adviser who took the time and trouble to get to know her.

With a lot of encouragement, she mustered the confidence to attend a pre-16 youth gateway course run by Careers Wales Gwent. Having said she wanted to be a hairdresser, her adviser’s assessment that Mackenzie needed to improve her communication and basic life skills led to some intensive one-to-one support to help her get on to a vocationalaccess course.

Seeing her adviser a couple of times a month over the summer, she was then helped to apply for educational maintenance allowance (though no longer available to new applicants in England, EMA is still paid in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and a college bursary, and put in touch with an organisation for young carers.

This ongoing relationship with an adviser who got to know her was clearly important. Without it, says Mackenzie, “I’d have been worried, because I wouldn’t have known what to do and I wouldn’t have been able to do my course. I’d have just been staying at home.”

With hard work and probably a fair bit more guidance as she navigates her way through future training options, Mackenzie hopefully won’t end up adding to the youth unemployment numbers. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show there are now almost one million young people under 25 who are out of work. If you are 16 or 17, the picture is bleaker still – fewer than a quarter have jobs.

Add in mid-career public sector employees being made redundant in their tens of thousands – 111,000 in the second quarter of this year to be more precise – and you have 2.57 million people out of work.

Given that Jobcentres do not do much for professionals who have been made redundant, their advisers are not available to anyone under the age of 18, and Connexions centres which did cater for the 16-19 age range are being closed en masse, many are confused as to the kind of advice available to the huge variety of differently skilled and experienced people seeking new career and training pathways.

Come next spring, when two national careers services will be launched in England and Wales (Scotland’s, a web portal called My World of Work, has just gone live), what is available may well look very different to what is on offer now.

A “blended” approach now seems to be the official mantra to describe the shape of careers services to come. Translated, that means more automation with websites and helplines being heavily promoted. Put more bluntly, careers websites are cheaper than trained and experienced advisers, meaning more of the former and fewer of the latter.

Cheaper, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean less effective. Jane Artess, research director at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (Hecsu), who is overseeing the revamp of its graduate careers website Prospects.ac.uk, says the increasing automation of careers services has the potential to work very well for certain segments of the population, but only if a good support mechanism is put in place around it. “The web is a fantastic place for information, but it’s not such a great place for guidance,” she says. “It is not sufficient on its own.”

Her view is shared by Ciaran Wrynn, head of programme design and delivery for career transition at recruitment consultants Hays. “There’s no way the internet can tap into motivation or challenge beliefs,” he says. “But a blended approach means people can enter the job market more effectively.”

At Skills Development Scotland, director of service design and innovation, Jonathan Clark, points out that because the workplace has become more complex and varied, “the notion that one person could be a gateway to all the opportunities in the world of work is not very realistic any more”.

Those who will benefit most from the new web portals, he says, will be self-motivated, with the personal skills and resilience to enjoy the experience of exploring and planning their career direction.

However, Paul Chubb, director of Careers England, the membership organisation for careers professionals, says many of his members are concerned that over-reliance on web portals and call centres will disadvantage those who are already struggling to break into the jobs market. “The idea of taking responsibility for their own career planning may be unthinkable for some younger and more vulnerable people without a great deal of one-to-one support,” he says.

Imagine you have literacy problems. Or don’t have a computer at home. Or you can’t afford a new computer and the one you’ve got won’t run Flash, so websites look weird and you can’t access certain pages. Or you’re 16 and left school with poor qualifications; you may not have the confidence to even get started, let alone the motivation to keep going when you realise how much self-directed research you have to do.

For many unemployed aged under 19, this last point may prove the biggest obstacle. In England, anyone over 19 is currently eligible to talk to an adviser face-to-face. But when the national careers service launches next year, those aged 16-19 will not have the right to personalised careers guidance. The £200m that pays for this advice service will disappear into the Department for Education’s coffers. Personalised careers advice will remain available to adults because the Department for Work and Pensions will continue to fund it.

The Education bill proposes that for those still in school, headteachers will need to buy in careers services from private providers, although no extra funding will be made available. A recently published Careers England report into the impact of career guidance in England claims that, because the bill does not require much in the way of quality assurance, bought-in services are “likely to have neither a guarantee of professional competence nor labour market intelligence” and raises “serious concerns about impartiality”.

On the other hand, there is not much out there for those leaving school at 16, other than a website and a phone number.

“If you’re just sitting typing at a computer it’s not really going to build your confidence – you need to be able to ask loads of questions,” says Shaun Donald, 18, from Dundee.

He left school in 2009 and, after a work placement at office supplies retailer Staples, began a college course in art and design. After five months when he realised he couldn’t afford the cost of travel, he dropped out. Since then he has been looking for jobs, but with no success: his experience of short work placements and a false start at college is exactly why, say careers experts, he needs personalised guidance rather than a website to help him.

“There’s a million different sites,” Donald says. “You spend hours and hours ploughing through jobs, and when you find one you’ll be directed to another site and it’ll be gone.”

Just a few weeks ago however, once he hit 18, he started to get some one-to-one help at a job club, during which he was introduced to the Scottish web portal My World of Work. “The job club people have given me more confidence to search for jobs, and the website helped me find out what my skills and strengths are and helped with my CV – it looks amazing now,” he says. Using the website has been enjoyable he says, but once you’ve done your CV “you need to be able to talk things through as well”.

Ministers who want to direct more people towards websites “are confusing information with guidance”, according to Adrian Fayter, trade union Unison‘s representative for young people’s services in York, and a qualified careers adviser.

“Would the public accept only a web-based consultation with their GP? Would anyone seriously suggest psychotherapy services operate via a call centre? A guidance interview is an in-depth discussion – a mix of counselling, job interview, pep talk and a way for young people to reflect on their skills. For some, it challenges their misconceptions, and also the misconceptions they’ve been fed by other people. My opinion is that it would be disastrous for young people who are Neets [not in employment, education or training] to find that there was no expert help.”

Those with a degree may have rather better prospects, but unemployment is still high with one in five recent graduates out of work.

University careers services have had a mixed press which, believes Hecsu’s Jane Artess, stems partly from students failing to understand the myriad ways that careers officers work to increase their employability behind the scenes – for example, by building relationships with companies that come to recruit at jobs fairs.

However, with students soon to be paying more for their degrees and needing to see a concrete return, Nadim Choudhury, head of careers at the private London School of Business and Finance (LSBF), thinks university careers advisers will have to up their game.

“At LSBF we have totally repositioned our school to being career focused,” he says. “We offer a proactive training and development programme – there are 12 workshops that students must attend – and from the first day they start university, from their induction, the careers service is part of that planning.”

LSBF has a very different student profile to the University of the Arts London (UAL), where Steve Beddoe, director of student enterprise and employability, says many creative graduates wanting to become sole traders or work in micro-enterprises face problems that orthodox careers services simply don’t address.

To give students the skills and knowledge they need, a new, interactive UAL website now shows updates on training courses, peer-learning opportunities and short films demonstrating how artists have moved into their chosen careers.

Whether you are a creative or professional or manual worker, straight out of university or facing redundancy in your 50s, with a few qualifications or none to your name, it seems that will soon be using a variety of automated means to find work – online forums, text alerts, interactive personality tests and online CV assessment tools to name just a few.

But whatever a jobseeker’s level of skill, experience or qualification, every careers expert Guardian Work spoke to for this article agreed an automated careers service would not work without also offering f ace-to-face support.

The Scottish and Welsh national careers services give everyone the option of talking to a qualified, impartial professional. Will the English service change tack to do the same?

Useful careers sites

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