Professional integration and social participation depend on educational opportunities. Good educational guidance can add valuable support here. Educational guidance in Germany has just begun to come into fashion. A glance at the current situation.

Education is considered a key qualification for successful professional integration and social participation. The fact that both belong together and each form one side of the same coin has already been postulated in the European Commission's “Memorandum on Lifelong Learning” in 2000. But which educational path is the right one? What skills and qualifications do I need? With the multitude of possibilities that are open to those interested in further education, these questions are no longer so easy to answer as they were a few decades ago. Educational guidance thus plays an ever-increasing role. Traditional educational patterns need to be broken up and educational offers must be adapted to the respective requirements and biographical challenges. An important task in this case is providing educational opportunities for socially disadvantaged people. Due to a lack of skills and competencies, most of them are refused access to employment and social participation.

Despite the establishment of guidance institutions in the 1970s, educational guidance in Germany is still perceived as being relatively limited.

In the “Key points for up-to-date and sustainable educational offers in Germany” presented in February 2009, the “German National Guidance Forum in Education, Career and Employment” [Nationales Forum Beratung in Bildung, Beruf und Beschäftigung (nfb)] has recognised the causes in the federal fragmentation of competencies, the complexity of the educational offers and the differences in the quantity and quality of the offers. Last but not least, the federal structure in Germany and its different legal regulations are also a cause of the low use of the offers of educational guidance. For these reasons, educational and professional guidance is rarely carried out systematically and the information on the offers is usually gathered in personal surroundings. Yet conversions into the professional world and the living environment make it necessary to have a form of guidance that is adapted to the requirements of constant reorientation and lifelong learning. Transparency, access and quality are the criteria that call for a continuous development of the educational offer in Germany. The benchmark paper demands both the expansion of existing structures and a greater networking of guidance centres. Furthermore, it would be a good idea to create a network with the adult education bodies. The debate on the German Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning also enables better transparency to be achieved due to the comparability of qualifications. In 2009, a step was taken to improve the situation with the “Open Coordination Process on Quality Development in Guidance in Education, Career and Employment” of the nfb and University of Heidelberg. With support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, common quality standards and quality development measures for educational guidance in Germany are to be developed until the end of 2011.