Career guidance in the 21st century is a necessity, as the labour market became very diverse and is changing rapidly. Individuals should be able to set goals and plan their life, which applies to every role in individual's life, especially their career roles. Without doubt, students need to learn employment skills.

The first issue to be addressed is WHEN?

In grammar school, where I work, the biggest problem is a lack of time, as there is no time foreseen for career guidance, planning and management. In Canada, students attend a special class including career guidance, three years in a row that includes. Similar would be necessary in Slovenia. Counselling takes place during and after classes, which requires a lot of effort on part of students as well as counsellors. 

Other issues are WHO, WHAT and WHEN?

Who should counsel students on their personal development and choice of profession and education?

In my opinion, the most appropriate person to provide career guidance in secondary schools is the school counsellor, partly in cooperation with class teachers, parents and external associates.

Usually, there is only one counsellor employed per school, meaning that career guidance is only one of his many tasks. It would be necessary to employ a person, who's main task would be providing career guidance. From such perspective, it is important to think about training of these experts. As far as teachers are concerned, their class curricula does not include career guidance, which should be changed. External experts, who would cover different subjects like current employment trends, studying and working abroad, testing of interests, would be very welcome, if only their co-operation would not represent additional costs for the school.

I would also like to point out a problem of a large quantity of widely accessible (mostly on the Internet), but dispersed information. This makes searching for information difficult for counsellor, and at the same time, information found by a student can be too demanding to understand.

Problematic is also motivation of students to attend career guidance. Many students procrastinate decision on their studies until the last year of secondary education and that decide with too little consideration. They only reluctantly accept responsibility for independent career planning.

There are several reasons for such situation. One of them is Slovenia's political and economical past. In socialism, it was easier to find and keep employment. School programmes change slowly and that is why career guidance in secondary school still holds the same position as 20 years ago.

Another reason is the lack of finances for employing more guidance experts. There are not enough classrooms with computers available. Material conditions that would enable career guidance differ from school to school.

The third reason is the lack of training provision available for counsellors and teachers providing career guidance. Career guidance education should be compulsory and providing updated findings to teachers and counsellors. It is difficult to find useful information, accessible from one source and at the same time covering different fields like study, employment, etc. School counsellors are not provided with appropriate tools, computer programmes and other resources, needed in the process of counselling.

Among the consequences are very diverse programmes for students and apprentices. Programmes differ from school to school and are more or less extensive. The goals and the content are not defined. As the result, some students are provided with very little or no guidance.

Students devote too little time to career planning, apply for a study programme without giving it much thought, and are therefore often unsuccessful in their studies. According to the data collected by the Application-information office of the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, only 60.2 % of the students have progressed from the first into the second study year (data for the academic year 2002/03). Drop out rate in years 1 to 4 in the same academic year was even higher - 67.2 %.

During counselling interviews, students mostly express concern about where they will find a nice employment and earn a good salary in the future.

My suggestion

My suggestion would be that there should be more cooperation with the Ministry of Education in changing the grammar school curriculum, changing norms and cooperation with the National Institute of Education in adopting the programme of career guidance in order to solve the above mentioned problems. In cooperation with the National Institute of Education, different tests and materials for career guidance should be developed.