Rumyana is the Chairperson of Know and Can Association, Bulgaria. She has over 30 years’ experience as a teacher and trainer in formal and non-formal education. Rumyana has two Master Degrees – in Chemical engineering and Pedagogy. She is a certified trainer in soft skills, creative thinking and Forum Theater. She has attended numerous educational events at national and international levels.
The Importance of Career Guidance at School
Presentation
Contemporary life and the labour market require teaching and training to focus on achieving the goals of the New Skills Agenda for Europe. Its aim is to ensure that people develop a broad set of skills from early on in life and to make the most of Europe’s human capital, which will ultimately boost employability, competitiveness, and growth in Europe. Nowadays it is evident that in the labour market, there are significant skills gaps and skills mismatches and these skills mismatches hinder the productivity and growth of any organization or company.
On one hand, many people work in jobs that do not match their talents, and on the other hand 40% of European employers declare they have difficulty finding people with the right skills to grow and innovate.
To ensure that the flagship initiative “An Agenda for new skills and jobs” (a part of the Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth) will lead to the best possible outcomes and achieve its goals, the training systems need to be demand-driven, designed to improve the quality and relevance of training, and make skills more visible and competitive to enable people to make better career choices, find decent jobs and improve their life chances. The paradoxical existence of high youth unemployment rate and right-skilled-hunting in some spheres raises suspicion about the effectiveness of career guidance
leading to the right choice of education and profession.
Making a wrong choice to continue secondary and higher education is not an isolated case. The reasons are both ‘pressure’ from parents, relatives, and surroundings, and lack of knowledge about professions, especially those identified as professions of the future. In November 2022, the youth unemployment rate was 15.1 % which is much higher than the overall unemployment rate of 6%. In Europe, the high level of youth unemployment in 32% of cases is due to a wrong choice of education and subsequent training. That is not only 4 or 5 years lost, but also a loss of educational and human resources and energy. Early career counselling and guidance (before the secondary phase) is still at a low level in formal education programmes, especially in young democratic countries. As a process, it is laborious and time-consuming and possibly for this reason rarely practiced.
“Career guidance game in a city full of occupations” is a project implemented under the European Erasmus+ Program, KA2 Strategic Partnerships. The project developed a C-Game for students aged 12-16 to introduce occupations that might be of interest to them, broaden their labour market horizons and encourage them to start their professional orientation at an early age in order to be able to choose the relevant educational path. The C-Game is not designed to replace career guidance, but it helps students to become aware of their skills through a play. The game is set in a virtual city (www.play.c-game.eu) where students complete tasks according to one of the six scenarios they can choose. The professions are placed in buildings. During gaming the students undertakes interest self-assessment based on collecting a set of objects that represent working tools, gadgets, working environment, working activities, etc. The system remembers students ́ activities and after sufficient information offers them occupations corresponding to the detected students’ profiles.
Contact Details
Phone number: +359888503025
