How They Guide Students
From Singapore to the UAE, education systems are strengthening how students are guided toward university, and private companies are pushing the idea further.
Choosing what to study after school has never been harder. As artificial intelligence reshapes the job market faster than curricula can follow, the question of how students are guided toward university has climbed the agenda for educators worldwide, and the emerging answer is to start earlier and make guidance a structured part of school rather than a late, one-off conversation.
Singapore offers one of the most developed models. Through its Education and Career Guidance programme, the Ministry of Education places trained counsellors across secondary schools and post-secondary institutions and follows a national framework that moves students from self-awareness to exploration to planning, supported by a government portal families can use together, part of an effort to treat career guidance as a lifelong skill.
The UAE has moved in the same direction. Abu Dhabi’s education authority has convened forums to bring school and university counsellors together, the Ministry of Education has trained public-school counsellors to guide students earlier, and many schools now run career fairs, one-to-one counselling and future-skills workshops.
Private advisories are pushing the idea further, and Zenith Education has become one of the more visible in the region. The firm, which presented its methods at a March conference at the Marriott Jumeirah in Dubai, builds its guidance around where careers are heading. It has also released the Career Explorer, a free tool that maps more than 245 professions and how AI is likely to reshape them by 2030 and 2040, and that a number of international schools now use with their own students. “Most students are still counseled for a job market that no longer exists,” says founder Serge Nader. “We start from where the world is going, not where it has been.” His team pairs admissions expertise with backgrounds in enterprise AI and digital transformation across the Middle East and Africa, which the company says lets it read the gap between what schools teach and what employers will need.
The methods differ, but the direction is shared: in a world of work no one can fully predict, guidance can no longer afford to look backward.
Link to the Zenith Career Explorer: zenith-education.co/explore/jobs
