15 November 2006

The Annual Conference of ADSET took place on 31st October at Trafford Hall near Chester. ADSET, to quote its website www.adset.org.uk, is a membership organisation dedicated to improving the quality, management, use and usefulness of information in the training, careers guidance and employment fields.

Nowadays we are deluged in masses of information, with almost countless opportunities to go to a plethora of websites to gather yet more data, which may or may not help us to make sensible decisions. So it was entirely appropriate that ADSET should focus on questions concerning the nature, purpose and use of information.

The theme of the conference was a declaration that ‘Information is not Informing’. The keynote speech was delivered by Rebecca Tee, independent careers advisor, author (under her maiden name Rebecca Corfield as well as Rebecca Tee) and former president of the Institute of Career Guidance. She involved her audience in exploring the central themes that apply to the delivery of useful and helpful information to clients, particularly clients in need of careers advice.

She described three ways of looking at information:

1. Information is not neutral. It draws you in or repels you. This she described as the push-pull effect.
2. When trying to support people in their choices, information alone is not enough.
3. Spin is a way of helping people make sense of information that is around them.

Discussions of these drew out the views and experiences of her audience. They discussed with her how to achieve the good practice of fully engaging clients with the nature of their choices and the way information could be acquired and should be used.

Rebecca reflected on the way that careers guidance, and the issues to do with acquiring and developing a career, received little attention in the media. By contrast, she noted, health matters were everywhere.

As a result of this lack of media attention, many people were not aware that there was any guidance available at all. In fact, there is little adult guidance available for people who have a Level 2 qualification in many parts of the country, although Suffolk and Shropshire seem to be honourable exceptions to this.

For more information about Rebecca Tee, see www.rebeccatee.com.

Rebecca Tee

Hilary Nickell’s presentation on Using the Internet in Adult Guidance was full of valuable sources of information. He demonstrated many of them, including a new site to support nextstep advisors, www.advice-resources.co.uk, and intute.ac.uk, a free online service which provides the very best web resources for higher education and research. He also demonstrated some aspects of his own site, www.careercompanion.co.uk, which is well worth a look. In fact he provided a very useful list of nearly 200 websites of use to practitioners in guidance, information, education and lifelong learning.

He noted that according to a recent survey,

• 40% of online Britons receive regular newsfeeds
• 9.5 million use broadband
• learning online is expected to rise by 15%.

He felt that all this was positive, but began and ended his session with the observation that ‘well informed and professionally mediated web-based information has never been more important.’

In her workshop on the Data Protection Act, Hazel Edmunds, General Manager of ADSET, explored the workings of the Data Protection Act, which she said was widely misunderstood. The law states that personal data should

1. be fairly and lawfully processed
2. be processed for specified and lawful purposes
3. be adequate, relevant and not excessive (in terms of the sated reasons for collecting the data)
4. be accurate (in accordance with the data subject’s concept of accuracy)
5. not be kept for longer than is necessary
6. be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects
7. be secure
8. not be transferred to countries without adequate protection.

Hazel recommended that people should check the Information Commissioners website at www.ico.gov.uk, the UK’s independent authority set up to promote access to official information and to protect personal information.

Hazel Edmunds

Graham Gardiner, of Building Blocks Solutions, demonstrated how a simple device could facilitate and develop useful discussions and interviews. It was initially designed to provide a means of recording the results of needs analysis interviews, in a way that could provide comparative data.

The device at the heart of this is the Rickter Scale – nothing to do with earthquakes, by the way. It is a shallow rectangular box about twelve inches by eight, with its upper surface covered with ten scales measuring 0 – 10. Each of these has a slider, so it can record a score. On the left hand side are a series of ten headings, such as work, happiness, health, stress, alcohol, drugs. The person conducting an interview using the Scale has carefully crafted questions for each of the headings, which ask for a numerical response. For example, ‘On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your happiness at present?’ When all the questions have been answered, the scale shows a numerical and visual pattern of the way the client feel about him or herself. The interviewer can then go on to ask the client where he or she would want to be in six months time.

The people in the workshop all tried out the technique and were enthusiastic about its ease of use, and the way it produced useful information. For example, by aggregating scores it is possible to say, for example, that the group as a whole thought it was 20% less stressed after a particular course of action.

More information can be found on Graham’s website www.buildingblocks.org.uk.

Ruth Hawthorn is a senior fellow of NICEC, the National Institute for Careers and Counselling. In her workshop she discussed the Institute’s Briefing on ‘Employment Training Advice for Refugees: What Works?’. The Briefing is a compact but comprehensive document identifying refugee specialist services and the mainstream, and not so mainstream, sources of employment and training advice. Ruth explored some of the lessons that mainstream providers could learn from the specialists.

Sixteen issues for mainstream services advising refugees are briefly stated and discussed, including the sound advice ‘Never generalise about refugee clients. The only thing they have in common is that they were forced to leave their homes.’

To obtain copies of the briefing (free + 30p postage) phone NICEC on 01223 460277 or email julia.jones@crac.org.uk. Information about NICEC can be found on www.nicec.org.uk.