Challenges for guidance in Early Childhood and Primary Education

It is generally accepted that boys and girls who start Kindergarten or Primary Education do not know in which jobs they will work when they finish their compulsory studies. The reason is that many of these professions have not yet been created, but they will emerge over the years, exceeding all expectations. Challenges for guidance in Early Childhood and Primary Education.

This is one of the consequences of the technological disruption associated with the fourth industrial revolution, which we are already in, and which is going to cause very important changes in jobs, professions, companies, qualifications, consumption, investment, in short, the way of life of humanity.

From this perspective, specialists insist that if it is necessary to provide students with technical knowledge that, however, will be subjected to rapid obsolescence processes due to the rapid advance of technologies, it is also essential to introduce the learning of the so-called skills transversal or soft skills, which are precisely those that tend to last longer and help people to successfully face the changing challenges of the world of work.

Often there is a tendency to think that these skills should be part of the training processes associated with the workplace, when people finish compulsory studies and that they should not be included in the educational stages. But this idea is not correct in the times that we have to live. By acting in this way, a long period of about 12 years is lost for young people, in which they are trained, acquiring technical knowledge that could be complemented by learning and enhancing soft skills.

Therefore, there is no doubt that it is very important that students receive academic and professional guidance from Early Childhood and Primary Education, when they discover what they are like and what they really like. In this way they can begin to relate their abilities to the professions that appear, so that this serves to carry out an efficient management of their professional career in the future.

However, everything changes. And as employment and life opportunities are going to undergo very notable transformations in the coming years, it is evident that the objectives, methods and instruments used by academic and professional guidance must adapt to new challenges. Basically, a new approach is needed, different from the current one, for which the experiences and results of the existing processes will be of little use, since it will have to respond to new and hitherto unaddressed needs.

On some occasion, we have pointed out that this approach involves placing professional, academic and work orientation as the main axis of people's learning processes. This recognition must be produced from the highest level in the design of public policies in the competent ministerial sphere, to the smallest sphere of teaching teams in educational centers. The professional counselor must assume a fundamental role in the new times, and accordingly define new working methods.

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Educational or academic guidance, for example, in the different stages, should guide their interventions to give more support to the soft skills that students must acquire and value their effort, not only because of the academic results in learning the technical and compulsory subjects, but in performance in the new skills associated with the workplace. In this, the counselors must actively collaborate in the design of new continuous assessment tests that allow to detect progress in the acquisition of soft skills by students, even from an early age, and adopt the necessary measures, in your case, with the support of the entire educational community.

To achieve this objective, educational centers must be brought closer to the real world in which professional qualification emerges, that is, the productive environment, the actual activity of companies. Counselors are the ones who should achieve greater visibility of companies and organizations in the educational field, so that students, from a very early age, see how the acquisition of new skills that will allow them to develop in the new one is facilitated. Scenario of technological disruption.

But it is convenient to bear in mind that, given the magnitude of the effort to be made, this learning cannot be guaranteed only through a closer relationship between educational centers and companies, but it will also be necessary to enter the online technological environment, so that allow students, from a very early age, to become familiar with, learn and put into practice soft skills in a simple way, so that the subsequent evaluation of the processes by the professional advisors is possible. The digital portfolios appear as a solution to show the results of the work of the male and female students who demonstrate their achievements both in school and in the external environment, with methodologies such as the open badge

The orientation must introduce active and practical methodologies, to give the student the role of protagonist, offering all kinds of learning options for projects or problems, and all this focused on the acquisition of skills that will be necessary for personal progress. Similarly, counselors will have to introduce new assessment methods. Self-assessment will play a main role in the new model, making students know their strengths and weaknesses well, which fosters autonomy skills.

Faculty and guidance professionals must work together to face the new challenges. Teachers must play a fundamental role in the effective transmission of soft skills to their students, incorporating them into the curricular content. And, above all, the result of this collaboration with the counselors and the counselors, will be the design of which skills, knowledge and values ‹‹that should be taught in each stage of education, from Infant to Primary.

From this perspective, it can be affirmed that it is for the guidance professionals in Early Childhood and Primary Education, to a large extent, that the students of this century are able to coexist peacefully with robots, to take full advantage of the Artificial Intelligence or the multiple applications of the Internet of Things, advances that will materialize in the coming years. And this is done with sufficient communication and organization skills, teamwork, development of critical thinking, deployment of social skills and self-motivation to be creative, adaptable, kind, and of course, punctual, among other soft skills that can be learned. And develop.