3.4 Career guidance and counselling
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Career guidance and counselling services
An important and low-cost way of improving youth labor markets is to give guidance and information for young job seekers on education choices and employment opportunities. It helps youngsters to make a good decision when it comes to choosing their future occupations if it is based on information about professions and sectors with the best employment outlook. The Macedonian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, together with the ILO launched the Occupational Outlook website to provide easy access to this information. Occupational Outlook offers insight into 85 occupations that have positive job prospects in the medium term, such as bookkeeper, home caregiver or baker. For each profession, the Outlook provides a job description, conditions of work (pay, work schedule, work environment, work hazards); education, training and work experience requirements, and job prospects.
All young unemployed persons applying for the first time in the Employment Service Agency receive career guidance and employment counseling services to improve their capacities for finding employment in the labor market.
According to the now-expired document - Action Plan for Youth Employment 2016-2020 , until 2020, it was planned that at least 30% of the high school students and students enrolled in higher education will have access to career guidance and at least 30% of all youth registered youth in ESA will receive services for career guidance.
As a new employment action plan has not yet been developed, career counseling and guidance is mentioned in all other nationally adopted employment and education documents, but there is no publicly available information on how many young people will receive services for career guidance.
It’s important to note that since the expiration of the Action Plan, a new one hasn’t been adopted.
Funding
Based on the Action Plan for Youth Employment 2016-2020, for achieving the Outcome 1.3 of the Action Plan- Young people have access to career development services, a budget of 2 million euros was allocated. The Ministry of Education and Science allocated approximately 500.000 euros in integrating curriculum guidance in school, while the Employment Service Agency allocated approximately 1,5 million euros for providing information on the labor market and counseling and guidance services for young job seekers. It’s important to note that since the expiration of the Action Plan, a new one hasn’t been adopted.
Quality assurance
No specific mechanisms to ensure the quality of services related to career guidance is in place.