By Paul West

Director: Career Advice Services

Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to speak about the plans and actions taken to establish a national career advice helpline. We have been tasked with establishing a national helpline for the whole country and are working hard to setup the systems to accomplish this. It is important to conceptualise and create the system in a way that supports all existing learners and institutions, and supports the national objectives.

The system needs to help us to serve the hard-to-reach citizens of the country, as well as the people who are connected. We need to reach hundreds of thousands of citizens, maybe millions and this presents us with numerous challenges.

SAQA’s mandate and the Helpline

SAQA’s mandate is to provide communication, coordination and collaboration across education, training, development and the world of work, makes it a good vehicle to create this new national service.

I want to emphasise that the NQF & Career Advice Helpline will strive to link existing services throughout South Africa, before we consider creating any new services. To reach the greatest number of learners in the country, the Helpline will communicate through multiple channels - a so-called Multi-channel Helpline. We have launched a telephone Helpline that will be grown organically. Initially, the Helpline is operating from 08:30 to 16:30 on weekdays. Later on, in 2011, once enough Career Advisors have been recruited, we will strive to move to longer hours - that is 8am to 10pm, and operate 6 days per week.

Already, learners, parents and employers are able to phone on a share-call number and ask for a Helpline Advisor to phone back. Indeed, many calls need to be returned anyway, because Advisors need to carry out research to find the most optimal solution for callers’ questions.

If a person sends a text message to our SMS number, a Helpline Advisor will call back. If an email is received, a response will be forthcoming.

Helpline staff members are attending career exhibitions around the country and partnership discussions are underway with FET and other organisations to increase our possible reach to the rural areas of our country.

Many people in South Africa do have access to the Internet via computers or their cellphones, so we are establishing services to match these technologies. Over 42 million people are said to use cellphones so this is an important communication channel. Our website has been running since July, we have Facebook and Twitter pages and we constantly look to other new technologies to help communicate better. With over 1.8 million Facebook users in South Africa between the ages of 18 and 24, we need to take this technology seriously if we want to be reachable.

The Research

Regarding the research that preceded the current work, we need to go back a number of years, to research conducted by Dr Patricia Flederman and others found that there was little Career Advice in few of schools in South Africa and little or nothing in the rest of the country. It was even described as ‘thundershowers’ that fall in small areas.

While referred to as thundershowers, work in Career Advice is not completely unknown. The Careers Research and Information Centre (CRIC) and a network of NGO career centres worked in this area in from 1979 to the early 1990s and institutions of higher education have had ongoing programmes in this area.

SAQA commissioned a research scan of existing Career Advice in April 2008, that resulted in the publication of report that is available on its website. The scan found that:

Career Advice was inaccessible and unaffordable to most people;

•no national strategic policy leadership or coordination existed;

•no model existed for the systemic delivery of Career Advice;

•there was paltry funding to outreach organisations and

•no lifelong learning framework existed. 

The research reflected that what is needed, is to focus on the centrality of the individual in a systemic approach;

•That a lifelong learning framework should be employed;

•that access, inclusion, outreach and affordability should be taken into account when advising learners of all ages;

•that independent, comprehensive, quality information needed to be provided;

•that a technology could be used to link information and support to people who otherwise might not have access; and

•that the initiative needed strategic leadership and coordination.

The possible pathways a learner has at her or his disposal through their lives has become increasingly complex. The older ways of navigating through the system have become inadequate and support is needed. This is a form of navigational support to find one’s pathway through the existing systems and how they have changed over the years.  The complex of interlinking systems of work, learning, training and study have multiplied and so we need to provide a support mechanism for people, whether they are choosing subjects in Grade 9, changing career at 35 or 55, or considering new opportunities at 65 or 75. The new way of approaching this, needs to be lifelong.

Technology as an enabler of communication

To communicate with millions of South Africans in their official language of choice and at times of day that suit them sets the scene and challenge for us. We have embarked on a multi-channel approach as previously indicated and as a part of it, we will run a campaign of radio programmes in multiple languages, on local radio stations around the country. This is expected to reach some 3 million people later in this year and early next year. These programmes will be content-rich, covering topics like Learnerships and apprenticeships and self employment.

We are benefitting from the power of the Internet already with nearly a thousand people visiting our website and viewing over 6,000 pages of information per month. The website aims to be a ‘super-portal’ of information with links to existing organisations. Where organisations share our dream of offering Career Advice nationally, we provide links to free services on those websites. This is not an advertising service for commercial services, but rather a way for the majority of people who cannot afford to access the traditional channels, to access free or affordable services.

We need to best match learners to institutions and we would like to work with organisations on how to best accomplish this. If we can help to better match learners with programmes of study, employment and self-employment opportunities, we can strive for improvements in efficiency of the education system in reduced dropouts, mismatches and second starts.

The learning directory

We will be creating a national learning directory. This is to be a user-friendly, online catalogue where a learner can search for a field of study, within a postal code of GPS range. The result would be that a learner will be able to key in their postal code or GPS coordinates, the field they are interested in studying. The system will then be able to give the user a guideline on which institutions in a given radius offer the most appropriate programmes. It should also provide information on ways to gain experience and professional registrations where appropriate. We need to begin to specify the system, build it and gather the information to be provided.

The Helpline staff will listen to the caller and provide information on options that are available. Each person is unique and so each call is responded to with a tailored answer. The Career Advice Helpline has access to a growing internal knowledge base of information to help them help the caller. The information in the knowledge base helps the web developers to improve the website to help those people with Internet access to help themselves.

Partners

South Africa is not alone in the world and is able to use advice from other national Career Advice Helplines. Countries like the United Kingdom and New Zealand have already created comparable help lines and have provided invaluable experience. The collective wisdom of South African experience, the experience of other countries, highly skilled people and the latest technologies to support them are helping us to move at a rapid pace.

In addition to the need to establish a learning catalogue, we need help in the following two areas:

1. We need to find the contact details of all the career advisors at institutions in South Africa. We need to so that our Helpine staff can efficiently identify and transfer calls to institutions of learning around the country.

2. We are interested to find out if there are institutions that have the capacity to run short-courses for the unemployed youth under their community outreach schemes.

Career Advice will not progress just because we have established a walk-in service, participate in career exhibitions, have a telephone helpline, or a website - or a Facebook page - it will advance because every lecturer, teacher and parent in the country combines their efforts with every learner in the country to map out career alternatives. Where teachers, parents and learners do not have the necessary information, they need to know that there are many partners around the country who are willing to help and the network is growing. We will help to connect the dots - to connect information and people with career advice skills with learners, parents and teachers. 

To all partners, I hope the message is clear - we are here to work with you - to help learners to find you and the services you offer. This is especially the case if you also strive to reach more South Africans, to reach more people than ever before and to help to improve the provision of Career Advice at all levels and ages, anywhere in the country.

The Career Advice Helpline is a partner for you and we hope to work with you in future, if we are not already collaborating.

Thank you again for inviting me today.

Paul G. West

17 September 2010