Autumn will see the start of the new university-level course in education and career counselling at the Federal Institute for Adult Education (bifeb). Anyone who has been keeping up with the range of courses may well notice a change at their very first glance: The qualification is now being offered as a university-level course, meaning that graduates will be entitled to call themselves “qualified academic education and career counsellors”. But what else is different? What can prospective students expect from the course? And what awaits them afterwards in their new job? Lucia Paar from CONEDU posed these questions to Peter Schlögl, the course’s academic director. A conversation about ethics, detective work, and striking the right balance.

bifeb has a long and venerable tradition of training education and career counsellors, and its courses have kept on being developed further – and now is no different. So what’s new this time?

Peter Schlögl: One of the differences is that, for the first time, we’ve made it clear that this is a profession that needs or already has an academic foundation. And this is reflected symbolically by holding a graduation ceremony at the university. But that’s just a formal thing. The substance behind it is to recognise that people no longer have a standard repertoire of knowledge and skills and, instead, a course like this is their gateway into the job. With an eye on their future career development, it gives them the tools they need to stay up to date and keep on refreshing their knowledge time and again.

Although that’s a bit like “carrying coals to Newcastle”, as it’s something that advisors have always done. But there’s even more emphasis on it now with it being a university-level course. Another aspect is the fact that the certificate that graduates come out with will also become part of the formal system, perhaps making it easier for them to get their achievements recognised in the future. But that’s rarely top of the students’ priority lists. They want to learn and acquire skills that will stand them in good stead for the many varied challenges they’ll face in this highly demanding profession where you need to bring a lot to the table.

An initial needs analysis run by the Austrian Institute for Vocational Education Research (öibf) suggested that the course should focus even more strongly on ethical aspects. How is the course responding to this? And how else can you understand “ethics” in an education and career counselling context?

These days, if I want to give competent advice, I need to get a very clear picture in my mind of who I’m acting on behalf of. Am I only there for the person sitting opposite me? Or might there also be some other actors in society who have a legitimate interest in the end result? For example, counselling institutions are often required to provide evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of their work.

The people who are seeking advice rarely know what difference it makes whereabouts in the complex counselling landscape they obtain that advice from. Will they be getting advice from a labour-market-policy angle? Is it a matter of education policy, of strengthening their character, of assessing their skills? All of these are issues that have to be raised when you’re clarifying the terms of your engagement with these individuals so that they can get a good idea of what they’re after. It allows both the people seeking advice and those giving it out to get on better with their respective tasks. So it’s about what role I play as a person and what role my advice or my institution plays in the overall context of Austrian society.

It’s also something that’s changed a bit over time. In the past, education and career counselling was focused very much on choosing an education pathway or matching people to job descriptions based on their personality traits. Formative elements have also come much more to the fore now. For example, when the person and their counsellor go on a little “journey through life” together in which elements of their life story also play a part.

And that poses some more ethical questions: In my role as counsellor, what am I skilled in, what am I responsible for, and where does my work end? Think about a phenomenon that’s ever-present in the world of work, for example: burnout. It’s something that’s increasingly being discussed in consultations. But education and career counsellors aren’t the right people to tackle it given their qualifications. They might be the first to spot it and give a few tips, but they’re not able to offer any help in the form of therapy so have to refer the individuals on to experts in a professional manner.

When you do a lot of delving into people’s life stories, you also come across sensitive information that you have to deal with – from confidentiality through to computer-based documentation, where you likewise have to handle information in confidence. What kind of documentation do I need for a consultation, and what shouldn’t be recorded in writing from an ethical and/or privacy and data protection perspective? It’s a sensitive topic. And here’s a classic example: Someone in a wheelchair comes along to a consultation to find out about potential funding for an English course. That undoubtedly poses a certain ethical dilemma for me: Do I make a note of the fact that the person has a physical disability, something that might be of interest to the bodies awarding funding? [There are education grants specifically for people with a disability, Ed.] This is because, as far as the actual underlying reason for the consultation is concerned – getting financial support – these circumstances are generally about as relevant as whether the person is wearing a blue or a green jumper, i.e. not very. This is something you have to deal with, although there’s no one way that will always be appropriate. 

And then there’s another ethical aspect, one that gets right to the heart of counselling as a profession. For example, how do you lead a conversation with someone who’s already quit several courses? How can I be tactful and stay within the bounds of my role while also giving them some clear indications that, after ditching a course for the fourth, fifth or sixth time, it might not all be down to external factors – might the person themselves have something to do with it? How do you get the message across in such a way that the person is able to take it on board and draw their own conclusions without feeling hurt or demotivated by it?

And how can you address that on the course?

There are some aspects that you can cover in a single module. At the same time, it’s just like any other case of human interaction that also involves information gaps and power imbalances: As a counsellor, you have to be aware of these in order to handle them in a measured way. This has to be addressed in exactly the same fashion in the core subjects covered on the course, and the corresponding knowledge has to be kept constantly up to date, so that you end up with conscientious counsellors who can handle inclusion issues and who don’t convey an image or produce results from their consultations that don’t meet the requirements in terms of the bigger picture.

Earlier, you also mentioned the various actors who sometimes have to be accommodated to a greater or lesser extent. These various objectives don’t always dovetail perfectly. Rather, there are often areas of tension – if you think about the needs of society on the one hand versus the educational needs of the individual on the other, for instance. How can you prepare counsellors for this, and what do they ultimately need to bring to the table themselves?

Counsellors need a certain level of ambiguity tolerance. They need to make it clear to the individuals they’re working with that there are many different goals in play when people make decisions and that there’s no single best way to do things. Rather, you need to strike a balance. In the contemporary debate over the profession, this is one of the hallmarks of an expert, if you follow Schütze’s interpretation: Experts are precisely those people who help to strike this balance so that as many goals as possible can be achieved to the greatest possible extent. If, for example, an older person wants to change jobs, this can also bring a risk because they’d also be giving up other things. This is counselling expertise at its best: explaining what belongs in the bigger picture and how an individual goal can have an impact on other ones. Every counselling process is unique in that respect, because every person has a different life story to share.

On the course, this is tackled with case studies, reflective exercises, and scenarios that are played out in order to develop a certain routine without always adopting the same approach come what may.

When I was preparing for this interview, an advisor for the course recommended asking about how it addresses the topic of inclusion. Why was that? What can students expect in that regard?

Although we don’t have a module explicitly about inclusion, we do have some that look at social inequality and deprivation. Of course, there are specific groups who have very unique counselling needs or who face a particular situation on the job market. If you think, for instance, of people who become unemployed later in life, or women getting back into the world of work, young people, people who graduated abroad or people who can no longer do their job due to a recognised work-related illness. They have their very own funding schemes and instruments.

And then there’s the question of how we ensure inclusive access to counselling that encompasses everything from public relations work and being welcomed into an institution through to the design of information material. For example, I can’t plonk a 150-page textbook on the desk of someone with limited literacy skills or give adults materials designed for a 14-year-old. So it’s also a question of asking what tweaks you can make to create an inclusive offering.

Looked at from the opposite angle, you get this question: How do I know whether or not I’m inclusive? I can think I’m inclusive 100 times and then still get 75% of the people in my consultations who have a secondary-school leaving certificate. That’s not representative of the Austrian population. The point is to keep on carrying out reality checks: Where am I having an impact? Who’s being left out? And what can I do about this on limited resources? And I can say this based on my own counselling experience: Of course, it’s fantastic when I as a counsellor can advise people who have a great deal of resources and a good situation in life. The higher their level of education, the more opportunities they have, and the more comprehensive my counselling service can be. When people have scant financial resources or very little time, it can occasionally get very difficult from a counselling perspective. Then you’ve also got fewer options to play with, which can also make things tricky and frustrating. It’s not about saying “That’s good, that’s bad.” Instead, can you manage to engineer a change, reach more disadvantaged people and support them? Sometimes an extra 0.1 per cent is a major success if you’re talking about people that are really difficult to reach. So this is also a question of asking “Which tools will actually have an impact, and which ones will merely reproduce the status quo we already have in society?”

In other words, is it a little bit about reaching out to marginalised people more and seeing what they need while at the same time knowing that these people will ultimately have fewer options than others?

Yes, although the courses offered by the AMS, for instance, are already tailored to this client group. You don’t get so many academic types there. But this is a specific field for a period of unemployment. For the employment phase, when I want to strike out in a new direction, it’s fairly hard for people with a low level of qualifications to find opportunities, because our education system is still based very much on the formal levels: So there’s nothing below an apprenticeship certificate, and then you get the secondary-school leaving certificate or similar. This can be a major barrier for people who don’t have much time and aren’t that used to being in a learning setting. They might need a programme that’s broken down into smaller chunks, but those aren’t that common or are really expensive. These are the real-life difficulties that you have to grapple with in the counselling sector. Even if people are interested in and motivated about training, the right opportunities aren’t always there.

It’s becoming very clear that a lot of factors play a role in counselling. And now there’s another one entering the fray, at least in the public debate: the European factor. With an eye on the skill shortage, people are getting increasingly concerned about increasing mobility for learning and working. To what extent is this playing a role in counselling and on the course?

There are two issues in play here: The first is once again the question of who I’m acting on behalf of. On that point, I can say that it’s not an education and career counsellor’s job to promote labour market mobility. However, they do have a duty to show people these opportunities. What exchange schemes are out there? How do you go about finding the right expert organisations for them? Here, it’s more a question of being well connected and knowing which specialist institutions you can refer people on to. The other question is whether this is a realistic option for the individual concerned. You carry a lot of responsibility when someone’s completely ditching their old life for a new one. So you can always broach these subjects, but the key question is this: Who am I giving my advice for?

Or, another example from the “Frauen in die Technik” [“Getting women into engineering”] scheme: I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t know that you can earn more in technical professions than in traditionally “female” occupations. So the fact that fewer women enter professions like these is probably down to more than just a question of knowledge. And that brings us back to the question of ethics: Maybe young women need encouragement instead: “I’m confident you can do it.” I’d still view that as part of a counsellor’s job, but it’s not about sticking your oar in in a way that shapes people’s career or mobility choices. You have to stick with the interests and motivation of the individuals coming to you for advice.

If we look at our conversation as a whole, we start to see many things that you have to offer as a counsellor: ambiguity tolerance, a modicum of frustration tolerance too, a clear understanding of your role, good networking skills, and so on. Hearing that now, what kinds of people will think that the course is something for them?

Essentially, they will probably be people who have quite a helpful nature and who have already had some involvement with the education sector at some point in their lives. For example, they could be teachers or social workers. I think you need to be someone who’s quite attentive towards people. You might also need a bit of a detective’s eye. Take me, for example. I’ve only been a professional counsellor for just under three years, but I can’t think of any time during my career or my studies when I’ve learnt as much as I have in these three years. Every case is different. Even if you’ve led hundreds of consultations, you can easily find yourself sat opposite someone who’s got an issue or problem that you’ve never had to deal with before. And then you start doing your own research. So counselling always has an element of detective work about it.

The job also lies at the interface with education policy. It’s also about using the experience gained day to day in counselling to identify what’s lacking in the system. After all, you get many cases in counselling, for example, because there aren’t enough training places here or there or because funding models aren’t suitable for certain target groups. For instance, there was an interesting project that the Upper Austria Chamber of Labour ran together with the öibf: the education radar (PDF). This used prototypical counselling cases to identify where there was a need for action in education policy. So you can help shape things in this direction as well. Anyone who has a certain feeling for injustice will definitely find something to do there.

And, purely in terms of formal qualifications, we thought of people who, for example, have studied education, have a teaching qualification, or come from a psychology or social work background when we designed the course. In other words, people who are very familiar with intensive interpersonal work processes and who have some kind of connection with the education system or the job market. They might also be people who are or have been involved in HR or on works councils. Although it is possible to develop a certain attitude towards people and make it professional, that’s a very long-term process over the course of your life. You can learn subject-specific content more quickly in a gradual or supplementary fashion. This is also what we’re aiming for with the course, i.e. finding a way in which people can acquire and record this knowledge.

For everyone who’s now thinking “That sounds like me” and who’s interested in the course, how can they sign up and when does it start?

Registration closes in September 2023 and the course begins in October 2023. We’ll be running the first modules in person at bifeb, after which – and this is another new element – we’re planning to introduce blended learning, i.e. alternating between face-to-face and online teaching. The in-person classes will focus mainly on dialogue, group work and meeting other people.

Information on the course is available on the bifeb website and from the university. There will also be an online fact-finding event on 15 June where people will be able to learn more about of the course.

Further information:

• The course in education and career counselling

Author of original article in German: Lucia Paar/CONEDU

Editing of original article in German: Marion Kirbis/CONEDU

Title picture: all rights reserved; photo: riccio, edited by EPALE