Career Guidance 90’ Online

The programme, offerded by the Open University for High Schoolers Association in Hungary,is based on in-person single or double classes, where two or three volunteering university students hold a career guidance session for a secondary-school class. Due to the pandemic, in 2021, members of the Association set out to bring the importance of career guidance and peer assistance to students in an online format. This was mainly for two reasons: first, they considered it important to overcome the challenges and hopelessness resulting from the pandemic by expressing their support to secondary-school students and confirming that it is worth consciously preparing for the future; second, they intended to make up for career guidance sessions that were not feasible due to education going digital and were thus cancelled.

Sessions offer a combination of self-awareness improvement and exercises aimed at expanding career knowledge. Their purpose is to enable students to consider which aspects they know can be relevant for their career choices, what characteristics and strengths they have and what motivates them, while also learning about different occupations.

A 90-minute session includes many exercises and even group work, but the 45-minute version can involve some interesting and useful exercises as well.

Sessions were given their final form through multiple rounds of testing within the Association. Their content was compiled with the involvement of teaching and psychology students in the Association who also provided training to their volunteers in addition to testing. Volunteers are young people aged 19 to 26 who, in addition to being university students, are also college members, mostly top students in their courses or even young graduates starting their careers who continue to take different training courses to learn the competences necessary to be “teachers”, lecturers and peer helpers.

Sessions themselves take the form of a short self-awareness process assisted by different applications that takes place online on an interactive platform and builds on group feedback and collaboration in addition to forms of individual work. Neither teachers of the class nor its form teacher usually attend these sessions so students are more open and able to get involved in the process being free from the forms of work in school to some extent.

Sessions have been met with positive reception from students, highlighting in their feedback that these sessions helped reinforce their current career choices or take new aspects into account and considered the digital solutions and tools used to be inventive and creative.

As a professional conclusion, it can be established that specialised classes also need career guidance as those in grammar schools do because there are many students who do not envisage their future in the fields they are currently studying. For our volunteers holding the sessions, these experiences mean a lot both professionally and on a human level as these interactions reaffirm the importance of their commitment.

This good practice was awarded the Hungarian Euroguidance Career Guidance Special Award for Volunteer Guidance Services.