Editorial Comment:

Summary

The authors seek to open a debate on how best to evaluate the effectiveness of the one-to-one careers guidance interview. Since the National Review of Careers Guidance in 1989/90, politicians, the CBI, the TECs, the CSB Inspectorate, fellow academics and careers service managers have all contributed to determining just what benefit(s) clients might derive from vocational guidance (which, for many clients, means the benefits they derive from the interview). However, the authors believe that, as at the time of writing this article, no significant national consensus had emerged. What the authors hope to do is a set a train in debate leading to such a consensus.

They felt that this would give strength to those bidding to run services, information to those contracting with intending providers and set durable benchmarks for those concerned with interview training. The article is written at a time of fundamental change for the Careers Service. Careers officers still spend considerable amounts of time closeted in one-to-one interviewing. They need to be able to explain succinctly and well why that has an outcome worth paying for and an outcome that goes beyond the production of a nicely-typed action plan. The authors suggest that there are good intellectual reasons why we should strive for a common understanding. Careers officers are, for the most part, self regulating and need, if they are to continue to develop professional integrity, a greater degree of openness about what they do and why. Holding a national debate will both necessitate and promote such frankness.

The authors would argue that clients can derive real benefits from well-executed careers guidance interviews and, equally as important, those are benefits, which clients cannot gain from interacting with a computer terminal. If those benefits are to be recognised and credit for them laid at the door of guidance workers, evaluation of guidance is going to have to be a sophisticated process.

Proper evaluation will involve both an aggregation and synthesis of the various methods available, not simply the adoption of a method on the grounds of its ease of application or its familiarity to the evaluator. It also needs to recognise that there are complexities inherent in guidance – the differences in clients, the differences in context, and the differences in practitioners – which bedevil exact measurement. Nonetheless, evaluation will be called for and, far from advocating that the whole area is too complex even to start, the authors want to move in the direction of establishing reliable, valid and reasonably objective ways of assessing the effectiveness of careers guidance practice. What they hope to have done is to have highlighted those methods they think do justice to the skill of the guidance workers and invite interested parties to make contact to take the debate further.