At the second Education Summit of the Employers’ Associations of Lower Saxony I spoke about the question career orientation usually skips: young people learn a great deal about which paths exist – and almost nothing about how to choose between them.

Talk: Sound decisions are the key – Career orientation through decision analysis
Event: 2nd UVN Education Summit, “Career orientation as the key to success”
Date and venue: 19 March 2025, Karriere-Campus Hannover
Host: Unternehmerverbände Niedersachsen e.V. (UVN)
Event page (UVN)  ·  Recording of the summit

Around 250 guests from business, schools and politics came together at the Karriere-Campus in Hannover. The political line-up showed how much weight the topic carries in Lower Saxony: two state ministers took part – Minister of Education Julia Willie Hamburg and Minister of Economic Affairs Olaf Lies, now Minister-President of the state.

Postponing is a decision too

Roughly one in three young people drops out of vocational training or university study shortly after starting – with consequences for the skills shortage and a considerable burden on the individuals themselves. One reason is rarely named: many young people see decisions as problems to be solved. Solving problems is unpleasant, so they put it off. At some point the window closes and only the leftovers remain. Or they do “nothing for now” – and the first “nothing for now” is usually followed by a second.

We need to inspire young people not only about careers, but about choosing one.

Decision competence is the missing building block

Internships, aptitude tools, careers fairs, open days: the existing offerings achieve a great deal, and they have one thing in common – they widen the range of choices. What they cannot do is make the choice. That requires the ability to decide independently and on a sound basis. Decision competence therefore does not compete with established career orientation; it is the building block that makes it effective.

I illustrated this with KLUGentscheiden, which I initiated as a research project at the University of Bayreuth. Using methods from decision analysis, we break a student’s decision down into manageable steps together with them: clarify objectives, develop alternatives, bring the two together. Our digital tool KLUGnavi supports the analysis. The evaluation shows that afterwards students perceive the choice of career or study programme as less difficult and rate themselves as more proactive and more self-efficacious (Siebert, Becker & Oeser, 2023, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education 21(1), 10–25).

The bottleneck is anchoring it in schools

Teachers’ interest is considerable – in Bavaria alone we have trained more than 400 of them as multipliers, and the materials are available free of charge. The real hurdle comes afterwards: it is precisely the most committed teachers who meet resistance when they try to establish the programme permanently at their school.

Saarland shows how it can work. There, “KLUGentscheiden! goes Saar” – funded by the statutory health insurance funds and run together with the Landesamt für Pädagogik und Medien and the Ministry of Education and Culture – is working on exactly that until 2027: adapting the materials to different timetable formats, qualifying teachers through train-the-trainer sessions, and handing delivery over to the schools themselves. That kind of structural anchoring is what is needed – and it is what I spoke about in Hannover.

More on materials and teacher training: klugentscheiden.org