More Vocational Guidance Needed?

Students and employers should be better informed about the knowledge, capabilities and potential of graduate in particular subjects, according to Victoria University's Professor of Management Accounting, Professor GJ. Schmitt.

At the Association of University Teachers' Seminar at Auckland in May, Professor Schmitt argued that the country spends hundreds of millions of dollars on education, and spends almost nothing on guiding the use which the community makes of the system.

This situation is analogous to that of a firm making a variety of goods, with frequent changes of quality, design, and end use, which does no advertising and gives no operating instructions to those who buy its products

"At present we rely on a very few vocational guidance officer, careers advisers and liaison officers to aid decisions. But, very largely, young people make up their own minds from limited knowledge of possibilities, haphazardly obtained, and influenced by the out-of-date, incomplete and inevitably biased knowledge and opinions of parents and friends.

"Employers, similarly, have little to guide them as to what are the qualities of the graduates and others that they hire-how frequently we hear complaints of the new graduate's preparation for day-to-day practical work."

Professor Schmitt suggested that the major requiremement seems to be a massive and continuing programme of public information.

"Such a programme would have to be based on thorough research and forecasting of future needs, involving sound and imaginative appreciation of changes likely during coming decades in the level and nature of skills and attributes that various vocations will demand," Professor Schmitt said.