Assessing career guidance skills in order to contribute to the empowerment of pupils

Abstract

The assessment of career guidance skills can give value to pupils and their actions, and contribute to their life projects. This requires an awareness of the elements that are at play in skills development and thus to the identification of these elements by teachers and their pupils. These elements form part of a common reference system which is essential to empower each person, that is to allow each person to participate and to be recognised as someone who can fulfill him·herself and contribute to society. In this article, we carried a retrospective analysis of the assessment forms proposed to teachers and students in the first years of secondary school in French-speaking Belgium. These assessment forms were included in a guidance booklet prototype that aimed to facilitate access and support the production of written evidence pertaining to elements of knowledge (on the self, school world and on the professional world) and elements of context, as well as action verbs. Altogether these elements could be combined to create and formalise "guidance skills". The analysis showed that if pupils and teachers manage to take ownership of the reference points through visual images, it is essential to guide them to use them to define and explain the skills practised. The development of assessment tools for career guidance skills should include a training on the cognitive strategy used to assess the skills. This is essential to foster the recognition and valorisation of skills, and to empower pupils to transfer their skills to other situations.