Quality Management in the Counselling and Orientation Services in Romania. Analyses, Findings, Recommendations

The serious economic situation, the increase of the unemployment rate, the migration of the labour force, the disappearance of some activity fields necessarily require the existence of some quality school and professional counselling and orientation services.The purpose of the hereby research study is that of developing an analysis about the current situation of the counselling services in Romania, both from the point of view of the existing regulating documents, of the legislation, proceedings and methodologies and from the perspective of the suppliers of these services and of the applied practices. Although at theoretical level school and professional counselling have had a long-established representation in the Romanian area, the practice in this field started to develop only after 1989, when new institutional mechanisms with attributions in this domain were set up, which raises some questions regarding the human and material resources involved, as well as the effectiveness of these services.The focus-group, the questionnaire, the structured interview, the observation represent the main instruments for the gathering of field data, which take into consideration aspects such as: the identification of the evaluation criteria regarding the orientation quality, of those indicators that are low representative at national level; the analysis of the existing procedures in the management of counselling and orientation services; the detection of those aspects of the orientation process for which evaluation criteria cannot be/have not been established; the analysis of the positive aspects, as well as of the critical points that delimit the current framework of the counselling process development.Finally, we intend to formulate some recommendations regarding the improvement of the school and professional counselling and orientation process.