Personal Guidance
The term ‘career guidance’ is used by both Gatsby and the Careers Strategy to describe the full range of career-related interventions which support young people to make choices and to develop their career thinking. ‘Career guidance’ therefore describes all eight of Gatsby’s Benchmarks. The eighth of these Benchmarks are concerned with ‘personal guidance.’
Personal guidance describes the one-to-one interactions which take place between a careers adviser and a young person. Within Benchmark 8 of the Gatsby report there is a requirement for schools and colleges to provide young people with access to personal guidance. This should be with a careers adviser who should be trained to a minimum of level 6.
Careers advisers usually have sole responsibility for the delivery of personal guidance. However, it is important to recognise that they are also typically involved in the delivery of many of the other Gatsby Benchmarks.
There is good evidence which demonstrates the impact of personal guidance. It is associated with a range of short and long-term impacts on an individual’s:
Extracted from Careers Guidance – What Works
The Career Development Institute state that: ‘Career development professionals’ should be:
A professional Careers Adviser is defined as a practitioner who has been trained and should hold a relevant career guidance/ development qualification at a minimum of level 6 (equivalent of postgraduate degree level).
You can search the professional register (hosted by the Career Development Institute)
Or contact one of the three main providers in Cornwall:
The key difference between a Careers Leader and a Careers Adviser is that the Careers Leader is the person who is responsible for the strategic plans and delivery of the whole school careers programme, the Careers Adviser delivers personal guidance to students individually or in group. It is possible that the Careers Leader also acts as the Careers
Adviser if suitably qualified. However, it is important to remember that the Benchmarks outline that every student should have an interview before 16 and one after they are 16. Interviews often last 30 minutes or more. The Careers Leader role, overseeing the whole school careers programme, is a significant task. It therefore may not be realistic for
the roles to be combined, particularly for large schools.
Many schools are choosing to train someone from within the existing staff to deliver personal guidance rather than buy it in from an external provider. It is imperative that this person can provide impartial advice.
Details on qualifications and training can be found on the CDI website.
The CDI’s commissioning guide provides practical information and advice to help schools commission independent careers guidance for pupils.
The benchmark sets a high standard and states that staff giving one-to-one guidance to students should be qualified to an appropriate level, and the CDI specifies that to be on their register advisers must be level 6 or above. The government recommends that schools source their providers of personal guidance from this register.