Over the past ten years, in the field of educational counselling, employment and career development numerous new activities have been developed. However, they are still not systemically organised into strategic, legislative and regulatory documents. Therefore the responsible parties – the policy-makers – often do not recognize such activities as an important contribution to development of a certain field or development of human resources. This is especially true for counselling activities aimed at marginal groups who need more support in re-entering the labour market, education or active coexistence with other people.

Looking from the point of my field of work, the development of informing and counselling in adult education, I have to say that we managed to set this activity within some key strategic documents in the field of adult education. Nevertheless, in practice we have to continually prove the importance and efficiency of these activities in order to maintain its financing year after year. Due to lack of permanent financing it is difficult to adopt long-term development strategy.

Therefore, it would be perhaps easier for our field, as well as those that are not yet sufficiently established and systemically set, to have a special institution in Slovenia, which would plan and balance development and application of various counselling activities that support the implementation of lifelong learning and career development concepts in their broadest sense. This way it would be possible to ensure greater transparency and linking of different activities.

Reasons:

• The ministries that should guide the development of these activities (Ministries of education, labour and science) do not have the staff working exclusively in these fields;
• Different counselling activities are under the authority of different ministries, but the ministries do not cooperate;
• Individual specialist organizations who deal with counselling activities for education, employment, career development or similar, do not cooperate sufficiently (there are not enough interdisciplinary and research projects).

Consequences:

• Non-transparency of different counselling activities, lack of familiarity with their specifics and effects;
• Poor working conditions for certain, especially new activities, that are nevertheless important, especially when dealing with socially disadvantaged groups;
• In strategic documents, which are the basis for long-term financing, these activities are too broadly defined, or not defined at all;
• There is no comprehensive professional support for development and monitoring of provision of these activities, especially in terms of their efficiency and quality from the end user point of view;
• Disorganized situation in some activities and especially disorganization of professional staff within these activities.

Possible solutions:

• Establishing a national coordinating institution;
• Improving commitment of individual ministries (ministries for the fields of education, labour, higher education and science) in developing and ensuring conditions for provision of different services that importantly contribute to implementation of life-long learning concept and development of human resources, as seen from the viewpoint of local environments’ development;
• Special emphasis during the preparation of the Strategy for Life-long Learning 2010 (currently drawn up by the Ministry of Education and Sport) should be given to the definition of roles of different counselling services that support the implementation of the life-long learning concept;
• Improved cooperation between different professions – interdisciplinary work is important for professional and research support of various counselling activities, as well as their development;
• Cooperation in international projects and international professional associations.