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46/ 2008
Bonn, 27.11.2008
"The career starts at school": BIBB recommendations for optimising school plant work experience
About 40% of young people leave the intermediate and lower secondary schools without concrete or realistic career wishes. This has immediate consequences: Because without a clear career aspiration the search for an apprenticeship is more often than not fruitless and some of those who do get apprenticeships discontinue their training and switch to a different trade, which wastes time and costs money. In the worst of cases, training is discontinued entirely. The reason given is often "wrong ideas about the occupation to be learned". School plant work experience is regarded as the most important practice-related module in schools of general education for making career orientation and career choice easier for young people. Yet a study by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) shows that despite the steadily increasing prominence of vocational guidance in schools it still needs to be optimised. In the research project "The career starts at school" the BIBB asked young people who had not yet finished school, teaching staff and companies providing training what possible improvements might lead to more sustainable vocational guidance in the schools, and derived recommendations from their replies.
The most important conclusion: If schools are to provide vocational guidance that is as good as the general education they provide, they must not be left to their own devices. The task of preparing young people realistically for the growing demands in training and career requires support from business, the social partners, juvenile welfare organisations, parents and, not least, from public institutions, from the municipalities to the employment agencies.
Another basic precondition for optimising plant work experience is a permanent sufficient supply of places. Well-structured and continuous vocational guidance should start in the schools in grade 7 at the latest. It should extend from initial encounters with the world of work through the determination of predilections and aptitudes and the imparting of social and personal skills to several periods of work experience building on one another between grade 8 and the beginning of grade 10.
The teaching staff have to have the relevant schooling before they can act as competent go-to persons. They should expand and update their knowledge and know-how regarding all aspects of training, career, requirements and opportunities on a regular basis through work experience and seminars. Active support of the teaching personnel engaged in vocational guidance by the school management and the rest of the teaching staff is also important if the individual measures are to build on each other and be harmonised between disciplines.
If what the school offers is not enough, further work experience on a voluntary basis is very helpful. This possibility however, according to the study, is used far to seldom. Mandatory standards would be helpful in bridging the great differences in the provision of plant work experience from school to school and smoothing out inequalities in the opportunities offered.
Intra-school communication, cooperation and information sharing among schools and vocational schools as well as with non-school stakeholders and partners are the basis for improvements in vocational guidance in the schools. All those concerned must take an active part in the process of ensuring that regional networks are viable and permanent. Central coordinating offices are very helpful in ensuring that that is the case.
In order to ensure the succession of the next generation of skilled workers in their own best interest, companies have to provide sufficient places on a permanent basis and organise work experience in such a way that the young people are expertly monitored and return to the school with a clear idea of what to expect in their chosen training occupation. How what was experienced in the world of work is systematically processed and made use of in the schools is a decisive factor. And another key conclusion of the study is that precisely the follow-up to the work experience is still given too little attention.
The findings of the BIBB research project are summarised in the publication The career starts at school. The importance of school plant work experience in the job orientation phase. The publication (Order No. 111 013) can be purchased for 19.90 euro from the W. Bertelsmann Verlag, phone +49-521/9110111, fax: +49-521/9110119, e-mail: service@wbv.de
Questions regarding content will be answered at BIBB by:
Thomas Bergzog, phone: +49-228/107-1228, e-mail: bergzog@bibb.de
