Beratung und Regulation

The article provides a systematizing overview of contemporary methodological approaches and results of research on guidance and counselling. As well qualitative as quantitative approaches will be explored and concerning its insight located. Different but also complementary findings become visible. At the end, it will be argued in favour of a further elaboration of research on guidance and counselling in adult education. Therefore, it should be looked for a mutual relation between studies and a shared vocabulary. Results of evaluations have to be received seriously by policy-makers and the administration. Research findings have to be integrated into initial and continuing education in the field of guidance and counselling.

In adult education as well as in social work voluntariness is regarded as a desirable – if not paramount – characteristic in the process of counselling. Therefore it should also be a fundamental part in the planning, performing and reflection of consultation. Thus professional counsellors need appropriate reflection templates and models in this regard. However, the discussion lacks a precise concept of voluntariness in the process of counselling. While it is often demanded, there rarely exist concise definitions. In this article, therefore, an attempt is made to go deeper into the different features and nuances of voluntariness in counselling situations and to structure them in a sensible way. The results are concretised by relating the standards of the National Forum of Counselling to educational and professional values. Thus we want to show a means to deal with matters of voluntariness from an adult education perspective.

The article focuses on guidance in adult education as a type of institutional talk. Multiple data sources were collected through a comparative case study of two providers to examine how the institutional contexts influenced the guidance. On the one hand the providers define the subjects of their guidance service and their selection of consultants is based on the content knowledge. Also the providers pursue institutional goals with their guidances. On the other hand the guidance-seekers have their own counselling concerns and goals, which the consultants have to deal with. It is also noted that the location of the guidance (one provider is located in the public employment office) influences how the participants interact. The research results show guidance in adult education is situated in a dialectic relation between the institutional context, the expectations of guidance-seekers and the professional selfconception of consultants.

Functional illiteracy is often perceived as being connected to a strong taboo. Nevertheless new empirical results show, that there is a widespread personal knowledge about functional illiterates. About 40?% of adults know someone who shows low performance in literacy. This knowledge theoretically offers great potential to inform those performing low in reading and/or writing about possibilities in Adult Basic Education. This potential however is by far not fully exploited. By the majority those who know someone with low performance in reading and writing do not inform this person about reading and writing classes. This can partly be explained by a severe lack of information not only for the person concerned but also for their networks of support.

The article deals with the importance of decision-making processes referring to professional practices in career counseling and continuing counseling. Based on an empirical analysis of specific details the process of counseling is being illustrated. Parts of this analysis are the counseling interviews that were selected and provided by the consultant him- or herself. Therefore the counseling interviews represent the common practice of the counseling process. The analysis was conducted as an analysis of dialogue patterns. The results of the analysis are being linked to the theoretical background.

Current political strategy to reform career guidance systems in Europe is regulated by subtle practices. Using the governmentality perspective, the purpose of this article is to make sense, in theoretical terms, of governmental reason and mechanisms in reshaping of career guidance systems. The investigation draws attention to mechanisms and practices such as monitoring and evaluation which indirectly operate in the policy process to make career guidance systems amenable for management. Drawing empirically on European policy texts, the analysis focuses on policy use of “good practice” and provision of data, which work upon the attitude to performance improvement and self-improvement. This article seeks to elucidate that incentive for learning from “good practice” and evaluation is related to the present form of governance by indirect mechanisms, and that this kind of governance enables constant reconstruction of career guidance.

An essential task for administrative staff in adult education is to develop and offer courses. In the field of economic education (basic education), there exist only very few offers and didactic material. Hence, there is a great demand to describe requirements concerning competencies to be taught in this area. Such requirements for competencies may serve as a base for the development of courses in adult education. This article explores the questions on which requirements concerning competencies in basic education can be described empirically. It will provide a theoretical and empirical basis for such a model of competencies. In conclusion, the potentials of such a model to be employed in praxis will be discussed and further research questions will be derived.

For various reasons adult participation in lifelong learning does not measure up to expectations tied to the agenda of lifelong learning. The article suggests that adults relate learning activities to their conceptions of life stages. Therefore, participation in institutionalized continuing education must rather be linked to life-stage-dependant decisions based on sociocultural patterns than to the acceptance of lifelong learning in general. Specifically in the stage of professional life, these orientations towards continuing education are formed by habitual perceptions of one’s own occupational and operational position. How do adults experience chances and possibilities of continuing education then? Continuing education is seen as a matter of course, as unattainable, as unreasonable or as irrelevant. The article underpins the supposition of life-stage-dependancy theoretically by differentiating between biography, life course as triadic sociocultural pattern and life course as category for longitudinal cohort research. Our assumption is also substantiated by empirical findings about baby boomers’ orientations towards learning and continuing education.

In the search for strategies to combat skills shortages, employees with simple tasks have often not been focused on. However, making up about 20?% of all employees, this group of workers represents an important qualification potential. It is the purpose of our paper to investigate the question whether expected or existing difficulties in filling vacancies for skilled personnel increase the training activities of firms towards employees in low-skilled jobs. Our analyses show that expected skills shortages are, besides other factors, one driver of the training participation of employees in low-skilled jobs.