Ireland should improve its training of career guidance counsellors and increase the level of guidance counselling available to adults, a major new OECD study has recommended.
The report also calls for the strengthening of career education programmes in the school curriculum here, and the development of new methods to improve information provided to governments about which students are provided with what types of services.
The study, entitled "Career Guidance and Public Policy - Bridging the Gap", draws on data from 14 countries, including the UK, Australia, Spain and Korea, to assess the effectiveness of government career guidance policies.
It follows another recent OECD report on second-level schools which ranked Ireland among the top three with regard to the provision of career guidance counselling.
Although governments in OECD countries are promoting lifelong learning policies to help their citizens cope with changing labour markets, they are falling short in their provision of career guidance to jobseekers, it says.
There are also large gaps between the goals of public policy and the capacity of national career guidance systems to meet these goals, the report claims.
It highlights insufficient use of modern information and communication technologies, limited access to services for adults, and a lack of co-ordination between key Departments and stakeholders as major weaknesses.
To counteract this, the report's authors advocate the introduction of improved national co-ordination arrangements, greater attention to research and data collection, and the development of more specialised training programmes for career guidance practitioners.
Commenting on the new report, Mr Pat Cahill, president of Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) said: "Our spending on education is near the bottom of the international league, as revealed in a previous OECD report.
"The ASTI would ask the Government to implement the recommendations of the OECD that every student is provided with appropriate guidance in their career-making decisions."
A spokesman for the Department of Education and Science said it welcomed the publication of the report and had already made significant progress on some of the key issues it had raised.