Final Report

3.5Best Practice Career Development Service Delivery Models

According to the findings of our review of the international literature on best practice career development models, the current benchmarks for best practice are still largely those established by the OECD review of career guidance policies in 14 OECD countries undertaken in the early 2000s, culminating in the 2004 report Career Guidance and Public Policy: Bridging the Gap (the OECD review).

While recognising the need to tailor any career development systems to the context in which they are intended to operate, the OECD (2004a) report identifies ten general features of effective lifelong guidance systems, which according to Ronald Sultana “can be framed as criteria which policy-makers can use to examine the adequacy of their current guidance systems in lifelong terms, and to determine priorities for action” (Sultana 2004, 129):

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  Transparency and ease of access over the lifespan, including a capacity to meet the needs of a diverse range of clients
  
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  Attention to key transition points over the lifespan
  
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  Flexibility and innovation in service delivery to reflect the differing needs and circumstances of diverse client groups
  
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  Processes to stimulate individuals to engage in regular review and planning;
  
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  Access to individual guidance by appropriately qualified practitioners for those who need such help, at times when they need it
  
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  Programmes for all young people to develop their career-management skills
  
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  Opportunities to investigate and experience learning and work options before choosing them
  
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  Access to service delivery that is independent of the interests of particular institutions or enterprises
  
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  Access to comprehensive and integrated educational, occupational and labour market information, and
  
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  Active involvement of relevant stakeholders.
  

However, the OECD (2004a) report’s conclusions regarding building policy frameworks for career development cautioned with regard to defining models of “best practice”:

There is no one common design for lifelong guidance systems. These will vary according to national traditions and administrative arrangements, and according to the stage of development of career guidance services. However in all countries policy-makers face common choices in designing lifelong guidance systems (OECD, 2004a, 137).

The report elaborates the nature of these choices as follows:

Policy makers need to decide: when the career guidance process should start; how long it should continue throughout life; how responsibility for young people should be shared at key decision points such as the transition from school to work or to tertiary education; whether to deliver services through specialised occupational and organisational structures that provide only career guidance, or to attempt to combine career guidance with other forms of personal services; whether services should be all-age or age-specific; and what mix of present models and more innovative approaches, of the sort outlined in this report, to use to deliver career guidance for adults (ibid, 137).

The OECD report also outlines seven key challenges to the establishment of effective career development systems:

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  Ensuring that resource allocation decisions give the first priority to systems that develop career self-management skills and career information, and that delivery systems match levels of personal help, from brief to extensive, to personal needs and circumstances, rather than assuming that everybody needs intensive personal career guidance
  
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  Ensuring greater diversity in the types of services that are available and in the ways that they are delivered, including greater diversity in staffing structures, wider use of self-help techniques, and a more integrated approach to the use of ICT (including helplines as well as the Internet)
  
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  Exploring the scope for facilitating measures, including appropriate incentives, designed to encourage the development of career guidance services within the private and voluntary sectors
  
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  Working more closely with professional associations and training bodies to improve education and training for career guidance practitioners, preferably on a cross-sectoral basis, producing professionals who can manage guidance resources as well as be engaged in direct service delivery
  
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  Improving the information base for public policy making, including gathering improved data on the financial and human resources devoted to career guidance, on client need and demand, on the characteristics of clients, on client satisfaction, and on the outcomes and cost-effectiveness of career guidance
  
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  Developing better quality assurance mechanisms and linking these to the funding of services, and
  
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  Developing stronger structures for strategic leadership (2004a, 129-130).
  

These criteria and challenges continue to remain pertinent for many OECD countries, including Australia and are discussed in greater detail throughout this report.

3.6Providing Lifelong Access to Career Development Services

As the focus of this literature review is upon approaches to career development for young people aged 5-24 years, considerations of an all-age lifelong career development system would seem to be precluded. But it is important to note, at the outset, that current expert opinion—from the findings of the OECD review through to the most current academic literature and our consultation with our expert panel—strongly emphasises the need to conceptualise career development policy within the framework of a lifelong learning system, which necessarily means being accessible to people from all age groups, at any stage in their lives (Hughes et al 2002; OECD 2004a).

This is in line with the now widely accepted recognition that career development—by its very definition—is not restricted to a particular discrete point in the individual’s development—i.e. adolescence or young adulthood—but is rather a lifelong process.

As Watts suggested when launching the Victorian Careers Curriculum Framework: “careers are no long chosen: they are constructed through the series of choices we make throughout our lives”. As a consequence, career service models no long constitute a single event that focuses on choosing a career, but a continuous career learning process designed to help individuals to construct their careers (Watts, 2010).

It is also because career development is seen as a lifelong process that current thinking—spearheaded by the OECD Review (2004a)—emphasises the need for career development services to develop for their users their own capacity for career management skills and career self-efficacy. That is, increasing the capacity of individuals to manage their own career process and transitions across the lifespan. As Gillie and Gillie-Isenhour (2003) argue:

Career self-management is the internalisation of career development processes that enable an individual to navigate and prosper in a world of work in which one’s relationship to employment is in a state of flux, in which changing jobs and employers is the norm (3).

These two aspects: 1) having lifelong access to career development support services, and 2) building the internal career resilience of individuals, are two essential ingredients of an effective lifelong guidance system, as recommended by the OECD review, through to all current research and literature reviews in the career development space.