Advice as a means of support for adult education has become a more important mediation tool between the concerns of the person wanting the advice and the requirements of the labour and education market in the context of lifelong learning in Germany.

A challenge for learners is the visualisation of their own skills. In times of growing responsibility for one's own learning processes and of being responsible for showing one's skills, we must ask how advice can provide support for the skills recognition process and how advisors can provide help in this area. Success factors for effective advice are trained staff with appropriate professional skills on the one hand and established didactic tools on the other. Skills recognition tools can provide such resources. Within this advice, these gain in importance primarily through the orientation towards informally acquired skills and their application at work or in everyday life. A skills recognition tool that has been especially developed for validating informally and non-formally acquired skills is the "ProfilPASS" (see http://www.profilpass-online.de/). This even expressly recommends professional accompaniment in the form of advice or a seminar. The ProfilPASS developed in Germany provides support for the person wanting advice as well as for the advisor, as a didactic tool in the advisory process. In the advisory settings, such validation tools serve to systematically assess and document the abilities and skills of the person wanting advice. They encourage him/her to intensively deal with his/her own actions and the skills used for these. The ProfilPASS has already been successfully implemented in Germany for a number of years and has now been translated into French. It will soon be available in English.