Competences of career counsellor for preparing the validation of competences

The range of services a career counsellor is expected to provide in a qualitative way is extending and becoming more complex, as these services are to be adapted to the individualised needs, to take into account and to valorise the whole educational, working and life experience or the people, helping them into their career development and more and more job transitions along it. The identification and valuation of the existing competencies the individuals have acquired during their life, in formal, non-formal or informal learning contexts, the tacit or documented real competencies are to be highlight and compared against occupational standards and market needs, and the counsellors are the ones matching the individuals' real competencies with the market needs, in order to facilitate the job transitions, the easier and quicker (re) integration into the labour market. Therefore, to the "classic" job and related competency profile of the career counsellor, the "overlapping" with the competency profile of an assessor of competencies is becoming bigger and the career counsellor is expected to be familiarised with the process of validation of competencies, and to be able to foster at least its preliminary/first phase, to be able to guide the candidate to a job for such solution of quicker certification of its competencies, for getting more chances to a better job and quicker employment. In the "Back to work" project we tried to identify the suitable competencies the career counsellor should have in this respect, and we have checked and validated them together with experienced career counsellor from Romania, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Denmark and UK. They will be presented in the paper, as a possible frame of competencies that were developed in addition to other frameworks of competencies and referential of competency profile a career counsellor should have (with the possibility therefore to identify, document, evaluate and get recognised and validated the competencies they have been acquired themselves into different learning contexts along their careers)