Q&A

Your education questions answered

Mid-40s, poor to average IT skills, clerical position, not feeling very secure or competitive. To where do I turn to find a more interesting and rewarding career?

Your letter is typical of many that I receive from people in less than fulfilling careers. Up to now, there have been almost no services to support and facilitate your search for a more fulfilling lifestyle. Thankfully, help may be at hand. As you know, support for those seeking career advice has been available only to young people in schools and to unemployed people in FÁS offices. At a recent OECD conference in Canada, I discovered that 65 per cent of people taking up employment, in any given year, are people in your position, moving from one employment to another. Yet governments all over the world have done nothing to help people in your position. That is about to change and Ireland is leading the way.

I recently attended the informal EU education ministers' meeting in Dublin Castle, hosted by Noel Dempsey. The key theme of his tenure is putting in place a Lifelong Guidance and Counselling service, available to all citizens, wherever and whenever they need it.

There is a vast amount of information out there to assist you in finding a richer career path. Your problem is sourcing the information, electronically or otherwise, that is relevant to your life situation and having a skilled guidance practitioner assist you in applying it to yourself. Only when we move away from regarding guidance services as something for students and unemployed people will we truly begin to become the most competitive economic area in the world, as set out in the Lisbon agenda.

The business community lectures us on the need to reduce wage costs, increase efficiencies, work harder and invest more in R&D. We never hear them talk about investing in human capital - which is you and me. Thankfully, in attempting to put in place a lifelong guidance service, Noel Dempsey is addressing the real needs of people in your situation.

Having heard that the Scandinavian countries have good services for adults, seeking employment support services, I spent two weeks working in the guidance service in Sweden. They have bright, attractive employment information offices, with trained guidance personnel on hand to assist people seeking information and advice.

We need to put in place services such as this for you and the tens of thousands of people in your situation. Only then can we truly harness the full capacity of our labour force, and allow all of us to reach our full potential.

The fact that our jobs will be more fulfilling, our career path more secure and our economy more competitive, is almost incidental to the fact that people will no longer find themselves frustrated in less than fulfilling jobs. Be patient, help may be at hand.

Brian Mooney is president of the Institute of Guidance