The quality, effectiveness and impact of study and career guidance are some of the key contents of Guidance Competence in the Future (OTULE), a training programme funded by the Finnish National Agency for Education and organised by the Tampere and Laurea Universities of Applied Sciences in cooperation with HKCGC Ltd in 2023-2025. For guidance counsellors from comprehensive, upper secondary and higher education participating in the training, process management is emphasised as a way to improve the quality of guidance services offered to clients in educational institutions. Applying a process-thinking approach to service production and development makes it easier to allocate professional resources efficiently and appropriately. When guidance services are of high quality, they are usually also socially and economically effective at the level of individuals, educational institutions and society.
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The environment in which lifelong guidance operates is constantly changing, while at the same time society’s expectations of the impact and effectiveness of guidance are increasing. Multi-professional and cross-sectoral collaboration is seen as a way to ensure better availability, accessibility and equity of guidance services. (Finnish Government 2020, ELO-Foorumi 2023). The importance of guidance is emphasised in responding to the individual needs of young people and adults, such as engagement in study and work, completion of education, smooth transitions from one level of education to another and further into the labour market, career planning and life management, and in supporting individuals’ overall well-being, coping and agency (Kasurinen & Launikari 2022). In particular, guidance plays a key role in helping and supporting young people and adults with special needs.
Quality and impact are not unambiguous phenomena
Since the early 2000s, the European Commission, Cedefop and the national authorities of the EU Member States have been working together to study the quality of guidance (e.g. Council of the European Union 2008). The quality of lifelong guidance depends on many factors. The question of what quality is or is not is by no means clear-cut. Quality can be considered from the perspective of many different actors, such as national authorities as funders of the service system and, at the level of educational institutions, guidance service providers and students/clients (Kasurinen & Launikari 2022). For all these actors, the quality of guidance appears different because they pay attention to different factors.
Guidance providers may measure the quality of guidance in terms of the cost-effective use of resources in the production of services, while individual students may not necessarily evaluate the guidance they receive according to financial indicators, but in terms of whether the guidance support they have received has helped them to make progress in their study and career paths. A more holistic understanding of the quality of guidance in an institution emerges when it is examined from a number of different angles and from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders. In order to measure the quality of guidance activities and processes, it is important to develop and use indicators that allow changes and variations in quality to be easily monitored and verified from year to year (Cedefop 2023).
Ideally, every educational institution should have a quality management mechanism (i.e. procedures, processes, systems) through which it plans, implements, monitors and develops its activities, such as the quality of its guidance services. Quality management includes quality assurance, development, management and steering (FINEEC 2024). The quality, effectiveness and impact of activities and services should be considered in the institution’s study and career guidance plan.
Assessing the impact of guidance also depends on whose perspective you are looking at it from. In the guidance sector, effectiveness is usually examined from the perspective of the client (e.g. student), the service provider (e.g. educational institution) and society as a whole (Kasurinen & Launikari 2022). Impact at the societal level refers to a broader, longer-term change aimed at positive development, i.e. societal benefit (e.g. raising the average level of education may lead to a higher employment rate or improve the impact of innovation activity). Impact usually occurs as a combined effect of several actors and their activities. Changes can be quantitative and measurable, as well as qualitative and observable. (Sitra 2024). If an educational institution functions effectively in carrying out its tasks (in particular teaching, guidance, student welfare and other support), it is likely that students will be the direct beneficiaries and that the rest of society will benefit indirectly over time.
Educational institution’s guidance processes
Process management is a holistic way of thinking in which the resources of an individual organisation are transformed into easily measurable and verifiable operations in accordance with the strategy (Siivonen 2019). A process refers to a set of activities that achieve organisational results (Laamanen 2005). Process descriptions outline what is critical to achieving key objectives. When critical stages are identified, measurement and development can be focused on the right things. At the heart of process management is the fact that in all work communities there is something permanent and repetitive that can be agreed upon and modelled as processes, such as service production, management or innovation activities.
The OTULE training has shown that it is necessary to strengthen the competence of guidance professionals in planning, developing, implementing and monitoring guidance processes in order to ensure high quality and effective guidance. It is crucial to identify, describe and develop the key processes of the educational institution. Clear service processes, in which each professional involved knows his or her responsibilities and obligations, improve multi-professional guidance cooperation and the quality of guidance activities in educational institutions (Kasurinen & Launikari 2022).
There are many guidance processes at different levels of education and in different types of educational institutions. The processes are usually institution-specific in their definition and implementation, linked to the institutional resources and competences, and the needs of the students/clients, and as such cannot be directly transferred to another organisation. Especially in a situation where an educational institution is starting to develop completely new processes, it should seek inspiration from effective practices of other educational institutions (see Palviainen 2024). Seeing how other actors have structured and described their own processes and the experts involved in them can save unnecessary work and focus on the essentials from the beginning. The development of study and career guidance processes is a joint task that concerns the whole school, including its management.
Challenges to the quality and impact of the guidance process
The guidance counsellors participating in the OTULE training were given a written task to describe a challenging client case and the guidance process involved. The purpose of the task was to make visible the factors that influence and possibly complicate the guidance process as a result of a challenging client situation. The counsellors’ client case descriptions were very detailed and highlighted the critical aspects of the guidance processes that had taken place in a very concrete way.
When the client’s life circumstances are difficult and burdened by multiple situational issues, the starting point for the guidance process is understandably challenging. In particular, the student’s health problems (e.g. depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorders), difficulties at home (e.g. problems with guardians, financial constraints), life management deficits (e.g. irregular daily routines, problems with prioritising and planning), persistent absenteeism from school, lack of motivation for learning and difficulties with self-awareness, and the various combinations of these different factors, increase the challenge level of the guidance process.
Cooperation between home and school is emphasised when a young person has difficulties with their studies, coping or everyday life, which guidance and student welfare services try to resolve. Some guidance counsellors pointed out that guardians are not always genuinely interested in the affairs or future of their offspring. This may have manifested itself in guardians not responding to the counsellor’s contacts or being unwilling to participate in discussions about the young person’s situation. Sometimes the guardians tended to know things ’better’ and took decisions on behalf of the young person without letting him/her make his/her voice properly heard, for example, an academic family was not enthusiastic about the young person’s orientation towards vocational training. Similarly, there were situations where the carers clearly did not have up-to-date information about the young person’s area of interest or other matters of importance to the young person. This sometimes led to a breakdown in communication and friction in the guidance process or, in the worst case, a complete breakdown.
The guidance counsellors’ competence, determination, resilience and flexibility were factors that helped to bring even the most difficult and time-consuming guidance processes to a positive conclusion for all parties. Many guidance counsellors said that it was very rewarding to see the progression from difficulty to success and the discovery of new opportunities. The knots in the young person’s life were unravelled together, creating the conditions for engagement and progress in their studies. When an appropriate solution to the situation was found, the young person’s own agency and self-efficacy began to increase during the guidance process and a more realistic self-image developed. Often the young person’s intrinsic motivation also returned as they realised what they were genuinely interested in, or what was otherwise meaningful to them.
About the author
Mika Launikari, PhD, M.Sc. (Econ.), has been working in the national and European context of lifelong guidance since the mid-1990s. Launikari’s career has included policy and strategy level involvement in lifelong guidance in Finland and the EU, guidance research and education, and guidance practice, methods and tools. Launikari has presented and lectured at many international conferences in the field of guidance and has published reports, articles and books on the subject.
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