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1. Career guidance and counselling services

2. Funding

3. Quality assurance

Career guidance and counselling services

The National Employment Agency functioning under the Ministry of Labour, Family, Youth and Social Solidarity, offers career guidance and counselling services for each unemployed person, including for young people, according to the law on employment and unemployment, law no. 76/2002 . 

These counselling services targeting unemployed young people have been included in the Youth Guarantee Implementation Plan, part of the implementation plan of the National Strategy on Employment 2021-2027 (Strategia Nationala pentru Ocuparea Fortei de Munca 2021-2027). Moreover, in accordance with the above-mentioned law and strategy, funding for these activities is accessible for the National Employment Agency, the Ministry in charge of the youth field, their subordinated county or local offices, NGOs and private providers of employment services and training.

Career guidance and counselling services are also provided for young people in education and training.

Public career guidance and counselling services targeting young people take place:

1. within the premises of local offices of the National Employment Agency, for young unemployed people through providing information regarding the available schemes: Youth Guarantee, career counselling, internship opportunities.
2. within the formal education institutions. The counsellor is an education specialist who plans and carries out counselling individual or group education aimed at adapting the pupil to specific problems in school environment; implements career education programs for the purpose of training competencies in the fields covered by the curricular area ‘Counselling and guidance’; organises programs extracurricular of vocational orientation; promotes and implements education programs for health care aimed at training and developing students' lifestyle management skills.

Funding

Funding for career guiding and counselling provided by the public employment services is ensured by a special budgetary fund of social insurance. The value of funding for the career guiding and counselling for young people cannot be determined in the total budget of the National Employment Agency for active employment measures. Additionally, EU funding (the European Social Fund and the European Social Fund Plus) have been used for the same measures, to increase the number of beneficiaries. 

The budget allocated by the National Employment Agency for employment measures have been:

• 970.71 million lei (about 195 million Euro) from the social insurance budget, including 400 million lei from EU funded projects in 2024;
• 876.84 million lei (about 176 million Euro) from the social insurance budget, including 446.10 million lei from EU funded projects in 2023;
• 1 016.28 million lei (about 204 million Euro) from the social insurance budget, including 440 million lei from EU funded projects in 2022.

Due to the form of budgets of public institutions in Romania, it is not possible to determine the amount allocated only for career guidance and counselling services for young people in schools, universities and the information and counselling centres. The National Employment Agency implements the employment programme for marginalised young people and the funding allocation only for this target group have been:

• 2.01 million lei (about 405 000 Euro) in 2024;
• 1.82 million lei (about 366 000 Euro) in 2023;
• 1.69 million lei (about 340 000 Euro) in 2022.

In schools and universities, the costs for these services are included in staff wages.

Quality assurance

The quality assurance mechanisms used by the National Employment Agency or by the schools in providing career counselling, if any, are not publicly available. The National Employment Agency monitors and can inspect its local offices, but this monitoring process is not focused on services for young people and the outcome of the monitoring is not systematically centralised.