Guidance Community Discussion Space

If you are, or work with people who are wishing to pursue ethical careers in science and technology, then you might be interested in this website. From the site you can download a variety of resources including a booklet 'An ethical career in science and technology' and briefings such as 'Your Career and Sustainable Development'go to www.sgr.org.uk/ethics.html to access the most recent briefings.

It may be more helpful for practitioners and those beginning research to read accounts that are specific to guidance. There are two main source for this:

1] Higgins, R. & Westergaard, J.(1998):"In Search of Guidance Models for the group context" Occasional Papers in Careers Guidance No 2: a collection of professional papers by the staff of the College of Guidance Studies: Stourbridge, Institute of Careers Guidance

2] Gothard, B., Mignot, P., Offer, M.S., Ruff,M.(2001): "Careers Guidance in Context", Chapter 4: "Group Work: Guidance in a group setting", London, Sage.

These two sources are about the only ones I know of that directly address the issues of group work in guidance specifically, rather than offering models from elsewhere that are not so easy to apply to a careers work or guidance context because developed for other reasons in other professional settings. Both these sources, however, take account of wider theories - e.g. theories of adult learning, and of personal construct psychology, for example.

Marcus Offer, NICEC.

This comment of Lucy Marris's needs to be supplemented by reading some of the material contained in the "resources" sub-section here. There is very significant experience of the use of email services generally in the UK: Not only do organisations such as Connexions Direct and Learn Direct deliver a number of services via this and related media, but Graduate Prospects has run a service for graduates nationally for several years, with tens of thousands of enquirers and has considerable experience to draw on. They have recently developed locally customnised faciltiies for university careers services to offer a similar email service to their own current students. The two key references are

1} Madahar,L. (2003) "Services for Graduates: A National Career Development Service for Graduates", Manchester, Graduate Prospects and

2) Madahar, L. and Offer, M. (2004) "Managing E-Guidance Interventions withing HE Careers Services", Manchester, Graduate Prospect.

A debate on the issues surfaced in Newscheck, October/November 2003 and February-May 2004 with initial short pieces by Marris, Reid and Madahar, taking opposite sides of the argument, and letters by Offer and Freeman, in the February-May 2004 issue (page 6).

The HECSU briefings "What is E-gudiance?" and "A checklist for advisers" cited in the Resources section of this part of the forum also take the debate further! I am particuarly keen to receive feedback from those with experience, on the latter, as a document on best practice in email guidance. I hope to develop this in future as a kind of "open source" documment that can be based on the growing experience of all those invovled in this new field

Other links - including links to executive summaries of the reports listed above, can be made from the NICEC web site e.g.

http://www.crac.org.uk/nicec/fellows/offer.htm and

http://www.crac.org.uk/nicec/research/archived_research/research_completed.htm

Marcus Offer

While this project has some very useful things to say, I do not feel that it necessarily gets to the bottom of what it means to use the web for guidance purposes: the ethical considerations are important but do not specifically identify how the actual design of a web site for careers guidance would differ in ways that reflect guidance principles. In other words, the Ariadne project as a whole seems to have collected a number of general principles about good web site/page design but they apply to more or less any use of the web, not specifcally to guidance. This is a common failing of such research (particularly at a European level, where the UK is actually ahead of other EU countries in its use of ICT in guidance and lowest common denominator factors prevail as a result). By contrast the second part of "Report on the CSU/NICEC Careers Service Web site design project 2001-2003" (Offer, M.S., 2003, Graduate Prospects, Manchester) and chapters in "Careers Services: Technology and the Future" (Offer, M, Sampson, J.P. Jr., and Watts, A.G., CSU, Manchester, 2001, directly address the actual guidance issues in detail and in ways that are more explicitly testable by research (e.g into usability of the templates developed in the former case or the practicality of the principles enunicated in the latter). Too often, it seems to me, we are in danger of overlooking how much practical experience we have in the UK to draw on in this field, especially in the area of HE careers services' use of the web and related technologies in the last few years! See also the documents filed in the resources section of this part of the NGRF.

Marcus Offer, NICEC.

Please note that my list of web sites on www.guidanceforum.net has not been updated for a couple of years and should only be used as a model of the approach to analysis and catgorisation of web sites against guidance outcomes: many of the links are now dead or better replaced by more up to date ones. I have no resources at present to maintain this page.

A related list is also accessible at http://www.careersoft.co.uk/mainpage.htm (and click on Webliinks from the left hand side menu, where Careersoft have taken over an earlier version of my DOTSMARKS list, and adapted it for use with younger people.

Marcus Offer

Note my message on the next level up, that this list is now wildly out of date and only usable as a model of how websites might be categorised as contributing to guidance outcomes (using the DOTS model in this case). I have no resources to update the list nor access to the page to take it down,(this also illustrates the need to note the date last reviewed on a web page!)

but a related list is also available at http://www.careersoft.co.uk/mainpage.htm developed by Careersoft from my original DOTSMARKS list, and aimed at practitioners working with young people. They are now responsible for updating and maintaining it.

The point of such a list is to demonstrate the need to relate, and possiblity of relating, web-based and ICT-based resources to the outcomes we wish to achieve in guidance, in order to justify using them in certain contexts in preference to other resources: it is not axiomatic that one should always use an ICT-based resource if something else would deliver the same outcome more effectively or efficiently, and unless you identify the outcomes the ICT-based resource are intended to deliver, how can you decide whether to use them or not? This leads on to the point that the use or non-use of ICT/Web-based resources in guidance, is a guidance issue, not a technical issue and requires guidance skills, not technical skills in the first instance - using the Web does not excuse one from applying the same professional guidance skills and knowledge one uses to select resources in other media!!

Marcus Offer, NICEC