National and international guidance bodies

• Institute of Guidance Counsellors

The Institute of Guidance Counsellors (IGC) is the professional body for guidance counsellors in Ireland, practising across a variety of settings, including post-primary schools, further education and training colleges, adult guidance, higher education and in private practice.

• Adult Education Guidance Service

The Adult Educational Guidance and Information Service is available to everyone over 18 years of age and to those over 16 years who are not in full-time education. The service prioritises those who are currently not in employment but is available to all. The service supports people in exploring their further education and training options while developing a personal progression plan.

The service offers:

• one-to-one educational guidance;
• information on local and national courses;
• help with college applications and;
• information on funding sources.

This professional service is free and confidential. You will find contact details for your local office here.

• Adult Guidance Association

The Adult Guidance Association aims to accurately and appropriately represent the views of its members to ensure the continued development of professional adult educational guidance in Ireland.

• Euroguidance
• EU Main Portal
• Other International Guidance Networks
• National Guidance Systems in Europe
• Irish Embassies across the world
• Léargas

Léargas manage international and national exchange programmes in education, youth and community work, and vocational education and training.

• Eurodesk

Eurodesk provides free information on opportunities-such as travelling, working, studying and volunteering in Europe, for young people aged 13-30.

• EQAVET

EQAVET is a Europe-wide framework to support quality assurance in VET. It helps Member States, training providers and other organisations to document, develop, monitor, evaluate and improve the quality of vocational education and training.

• EURYDICE

EURYDYCE provides descriptions of national education systems, comparative studies devoted to specific topics, indicators and statistics in the field of education.

• Europass EU

An initiative which aims to help you make your skills and qualifications clearly and easily understood in Europe — whether you are enrolling in an education or training programme, looking for a job, or getting experience abroad.

• Europass Ireland

The Europass profile can help people to plan their learning and career development. The profile can be used by organisations – employers, volunteer organisations, recruiters, guidance practitioners, youth organisations, education and training institutions and more – as part of the support and services they offer to people.

• NARIC

NARIC Ireland provides advice on the academic recognition of a foreign qualification by comparing it, where possible, to a major award type and level on the Irish National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ).

• National Framework of Qualifications

National Qualifications frameworks describe the qualifications of an education and training system and how they interlink. National qualifications frameworks describe what learners should know, understand and be able to do on the basis of a given qualification.

• Quality and Qualifications Ireland

Quality and Qualifications Ireland is an independent State agency responsible for promoting quality and accountability in education and training services in Ireland.

• Qualifax

Qualifax is Ireland’s National Learners’ Database. It is the "one-stop shop" for learners. It provides the most comprehensive information on further and higher education and training courses.

• European Qualifications Framework

The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) is a translation tool that helps communication and comparison between qualifications systems in Europe.

• Academia
• Educational Resources Information Centre

ERIC is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information. It is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences within the US Department of Education.

• EURES – European Employment Services

Services offered by EURES: European database of employment and traineeship opportunities with over 3 million vacancies available on www.eures.europa.eu

Contact a EURES adviser in Ireland here.

• School Education Gateway

Europe's online platform for school education.

The platform is the meeting point for all stakeholders in the school education sector – school staff, researchers, policymakers – to find news, interviews, publications, practice examples, courses and partners for their Erasmus+ projects.

• ESOL

Migrants and new community members in Ireland come from a wide range of cultural, linguistic, educational and social backgrounds; co-ordinated by NALA, ESOL is English for Speakers of Other Languages. ESOL focuses on English language development for students.

• The European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network

The European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network, ELGPN was established in 2007, with the aim of assisting its member countries and the European Commission in developing European co-operation on lifelong guidance in both the education and the employment sectors.

• CEDEFOP

CEDEFOP supports development of European vocational education and training (VET) policies and contributes to their implementation. The agency is helping the European Commission, EU member states and the social partners to develop the right European VET policies.

For information specific to work undertaken and tools available in the area of lifelong guidance, see here.

• European Skills Agenda

The Skills Agenda for Europe, adopted by the Commission on 10 June 2016, launched 10 actions to make the right training, skills and support available to people in the EU. The new European Skills Agenda builds upon the 10 actions of the Commission’s 2016 Skills Agenda with new targets for 2025.

• International Centre for Career Development and Public Policy (ICCDPP)

The Centre was established in 2004 to promote policy sharing and learning internationally through making international knowledge and expertise available to policymakers, researchers and career-development professionals.

• OECD Career Readiness

The OECD Career Readiness project is designed to provide new advice to governments, schools, employers and other stakeholders on how to best prepare young people to compete in the labour market. Drawing on international datasets, the project identifies career-related factors that make a difference to young people’s success in adult employment.

Euroguidance Europe

The Euroguidance Network is a network of national resource and information centres for guidance. It is a co-operation of centres throughout European countries that link the guidance systems in Europe. The main target group of Euroguidance is guidance practitioners and policymakers from both the educational and employment sectors in EU and EEA member states and in candidate countries.

• Euroguidance EU
• Euroguidance Ireland
• Europass
• EuroQuest
• Europe is Open to You

The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) is a European initiative to support mobility within the EU. It allows qualifications gained in any European country to be classified and organised into an eight-level system. It enables learners, learning providers and employers to compare qualifications between different countries' national framework qualifications (NFQ) systems.

Qualifications that are included within the Irish NFQ also have an EQF reference level. Visit the Irish Register of Qualifications (IRQ) for more information. The register helps make Irish qualifications visible in Europe as the IRQ is linked to the Qualifications Dataset Register on the upgraded Europass platform.

Irish Register of Qualifications

The QF-EHEA, commonly known as the Bologna Framework, is based on a three-cycle system (bachelor, master and doctorate). It is focused on higher education and facilitates recognition of study periods and qualifications earned abroad, building trust across the 49 member states included in the Bologna Framework.

Qualifications frameworks in Ireland and the UK

As learners and workers move between the UK and Ireland regularly, QQI know how important it is to be able to quickly compare and understand qualifications in both countries.

Although the UK is no longer a member of the EU, collaboration between the UK and Ireland is supported and in line with the Common Travel Area (CTA) Memorandum of Understanding. The qualifications authorities in the UK and Ireland have agreed the correspondence between qualifications frameworks in operation across the five jurisdictions.

QQI's Qualifications Can Cross Boundaries offers a short guide to the broad comparable levels of UK and Irish qualifications.

Email: guidance@education.gov.ie