In this presentation, originally given to the Virtual Euroguidance conference on the 30th of September, Ronald Sultana discusses the voice of the client in career guidance. He problematises the issue of client voice by balancing its democratic and progressive potential with the challenges and problems that it raises.
Career guidance for social justice 
Always thought provoking and sometimes too simplistic! Power is always at play even among and by intellectual elites (university staff!) and definitely in partnerships….it’s part of human nature and part of organisational behaviour and of politics in every meaning and context. There are no clean vacuum packs of humankind! There are also some false dichotomies in this presentation. Who defines and who decides which words are ‘dangerous’? Can partnership and accountability share the same world? Is accountability such a bad word? Are career practitioners accountable (and in which ways) to clients as well as to the organisations and institutions (missing from the partnership PPT) and governments for whom they work and to the taxpayers who pay their salaries? And where does accountability fit in private practice? People voting with their feet or professional ethics or both? What are the real limits of career practitioners as a profession? What are the real limits of the welfare state? What is their record on alleviating poverty? How does any type of state/government self-reform before it collapses and given human nature, is such collapse inevitable? And finally to answer one of the audience’s questions, the idea of user/beneficiary feedback in the career guidance process was introduced in 2002 in the discussions of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Lifelong Guidance concerning the quality assurance of career guidance services, was referenced in the 2004 Council Resolution on Lifelong Guidance, and the CEDEFOP (2005) publication “Improving lifelong guidance policies and systems: Using common European reference tools”.
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