Careers guidance at school in the canton of Vaud.
Why is it important? What are its flaws? What are the challenges?
Communemag discussed these questions with Marc Morandi, employment secretary at the Vaud Federation of Entrepreneurs and candidate for the Grand Council of Vaud.
At what age or in which school year should a child start thinking about which direction to take?
In fact, thinking about what direction a child might take should begin even before they start school, and be continued throughout the period of compulsory schooling.
Advising a child on their future is about helping them have a vision. It is also about helping them achieve it. The first port of call for guidance for young people is essentially their parents and families. It’s therefore very important to talk to your child about your own job, and to explain to them what you do and how it works to help them develop their own vision, and to support them in thinking about their own future. It’s also very important to think about the fun and leisure activities you do with your child. Because this is a good way to arouse their curiosity about what they like and don’t like doing, and about how they visualise their own adult lives.
Then comes the involvement of teachers, who have the tricky task of piquing the curiosity of their students in subjects which are sometimes less well known. Finally, the school careers counsellor should help pre-teens who are still undecided about their future, or who simply can’t visualise it. For these counsellors to be successful, it’s very important that the child is old enough to accept advice, help and guidance, that is to say between 11 and 12 years maximum. It is much harder to advise or guide a 14-year-old teenager.
What do you think of the role of careers counsellor in the Canton of Vaud?
This position or role is a very important one for the future of our young people - the adults of tomorrow, who will have to guide and lead our country towards its future. Personally, I think there are major gaps in the careers counselling service in our canton, and we urgently need to take a serious look at it, to rebalance the needs of the business market and boost the economy in the right direction to provide the building blocks for healthy prosperity.
The counsellors in place are trained psychologists. They definitely have the right profile to manage and help difficult and disruptive individuals, but in my opinion they are not in the best position to steer students towards their futures and advise them on their choice of career. It also saddens me sometimes to note that the careers counsellor’s mission these days is reduced to asking the student a few questions to find out what he or she wants to do as a job, when the counsellor’s real role should be to help students identify their true abilities, what they would like to do as a profession, and the route they need to take to get there. And to do that, you need to know about vocational training to be able to talk about it!
Many children are not monitored regularly to help them make career choices and don’t benefit from the advantages that school guidance is supposed to provide, because most careers counsellors work part-time, on several school sites, which limits their availability for each young person.
So you believe careers counselling has many problems at a cantonal level. Do you see any medium/long term solutions?
In my opinion, those working in the education sector must respect the value chain. Our economy needs professionals in all trades as much as it needs graduates from the largest universities.
Vocational training is therefore just as important as university study. It is more than essential that pupils are properly oriented before the end of secondary 1, so that each student can pursue the path that is best suited to his or her abilities, and so that each future adult can take their rightful place in society.
It is essential to make secondary 1 teachers aware of the importance of vocational training, and of the risks of systematically directing young people towards academia. It’s also very important that bosses and training officers get involved in this process. But in order for them to be able to invest in guiding and training young people, the Department of Training, Youth and Culture must allow representatives of both sectors to attend school sessions devoted to learning about the world of work, whose aim is to enlighten young people about the different trades.
And I stress that parents must continue to play a part because everyone has a distinct role to play in the chain - families, teachers and careers counsellors. Perhaps if we could clearly see the failure and dropout rates of first-year gymnasium (post- 16) students, we would have tangible arguments to demand some changes.
The world has always acknowledged that Switzerland has achieved the perfect balance in society. We have a very low unemployment rate, a skilled workforce and unparalleled expertise in various very important sectors. When I see today that we have 9,000 vacant positions for apprentices, it makes me think that the balance of our economy is in jeopardy, and we must act immediately.
New occupations have appeared in the job market in recent years, and more will appear in the near future. Switzerland must quickly get organised to set up new training courses.
What are these emerging professions, and how should Switzerland respond to them ?
There are new professions in most sectors: health, agriculture, transport, business, etc. In the industry of the future, the manufacturing trades, for example, will have to combine technical and technological skills because of the digital and ecological transformation in the professions. All professions will change with digital technology. Some of the “jobs of the future” are already a reality: roboticist, data scientist, civilian drone pilot, 3D printer, ecological engineer, biodiversity expert, etc.
Nowadays, the building trades, for example, are already strongly impacted by the new challenges of sustainable development, and most will have to integrate "green brick skills". And this trend is expected to intensify in the years to come.
Vocational training is federal (across 26 cantons, in four languages), which means that developing new training takes a long time.
The ideal would be to present pilot projects of new training courses with the support of the Swiss Confederation, to observe, analyse and evaluate the likelihood them being implemented before drawing up a new training plan.