Over the last week, Rie Thomsen and I have had the privilege of visiting Greenland and working closely with colleagues from AQQUT, the Greenlandic Centre for Guidance. We have been exploring some of the challenges that they are facing in trying to bring a national guidance strategy into being, professionalise career guidance in the country and deal with a number of unique and not-so-unique problems.
Greenland does have a number of things that mark it apart from other countries that I have worked in. It is both a post-colonial society and a Nordic country and is close to America whilst looking towards Europe. It is also enormous, with most of the settlements only connected by boat or helicopters, a place with an extreme climate and an unusual labour market and a very beautiful to visit.
While we were there Rie and I worked with colleagues at AQQUT to learn about some of the issues and challenges that the country was facing and explored different ways in which our experiences in other countries might be useful. Rie ran a very successful hybrid workshop with practitioners from up and down Greenland looking at career education and guidance in schools.
I led a webinar which included colleagues from Greenland as well as those from the Faroe Islands and Åland as well as from the wider Nordic region. In this webinar I looked at what Greenland might learn from some of the international research on how to address young people who are not in education employment and training.
This is what I had to say…
I hope that this will be the start of an ongoing collaboration with colleagues in Greenland. There are a lot of really interesting issues in this fascinating place that raise important questions about how ideas like career guidance can shift and adapt as they move into new contexts.
