The CEE Guidance Forum has published its Guidelines for Professional Guidance Associations in CEE: Supporting Professionalism and System Development.
The document is addressed to board members and active leaders of professional career guidance associations across the region. It draws on research conducted between November 2024 and April 2025 across four partner associations – ZKPRK (Slovakia), MPT Career Guidance Division (Hungary), SKPKR (Czech Republic), and ACROM (Romania) – using three instruments: a board self-evaluation questionnaire, a member survey sent to 337 members across the four associations, and 13 individual interviews and 7 focus groups with approximately 75 external participants including ministry officials, employers’ representatives, and public employment services.
The guidelines cover five areas: membership engagement and community building; professional development support; professional standards and quality assurance; policy influence and advocacy; and governance and organisational sustainability. Each area describes current practice, identifies key difficulties, and proposes concrete steps. The document aims to suggest directions that are “demanding enough to be useful but not so ambitious as to require resources none of these associations currently have.“
The three activities members rated as most important relative to their associations’ current performance – supervision and mentoring, shaping the national guidance system, and networking – are also the areas where the gap between expectation and delivery is largest. On professional standards, the document notes that “lack of clear regulation at the professional level with developed and monitored quality standards leads to the development and expansion of ‘opportunists’ who come to compensate for the lack of specialists and offer career counselling services under various names.” On governance, all four associations’ SWOT analyses identified the concentration of key functions in one or two people as a direct organisational threat.
The guidelines also document what the four associations are already doing well, with concrete examples: ZKPRK’s accredited training programme (approximately 170 practitioners trained since 2021) and Careers Week – initiative coordinating decentralised national events across Slovakia since 2017, ACROM’s annual national conference and webinars, SKPKR’s C-Course free multilingual e-learning, and HPA’s library of resources for career practitioners. All these examples and more can be consulted in our repository of good practices.
The full document is freely available at this address.