Doors of opportunity are opening for tens of thousands of young people and adults across Gwent thanks to the advice and support of a new "lifelong" guidance service.

The report on the first year of the expanded Careers Wales Gwent, which now covers all age groups, showed that well over 20,000 young people and more than 5,000 adults plugged into the expertise of its 160 staff based throughout the area.

Working through schools, colleges, workplaces and community locations, highly trained staff helped people to make crucial decisions on employment and learning which will affect much of their lives.

They included more than 800 steelworkers at a crossroads in their lives due to the major cutbacks at Llanwern and Ebbw Vale.

Working in close partnership with ELWa, Job Centre Plus (the Employment Service) and other partners, Careers Wales Gwent advisers helped many of these workers to reassess their own talents and aspirations and find fulfilling new pathways for the future.

This included new learning opportunities to boost their skill levels and pursue more ambitious goals in life.

In addition to help on training, advisers were able to guide anxious staff facing redundancy through many of the practical issues which arise, such as financial pressure and the impact of the job loss on their families.

Chief Executive of Careers Wales Gwent, Trina Neilson, said the establishment of the new all-age careers service had created major new opportunities for the organisation to reach people with valuable advice and information.

For example parents, who have always been brought into the career guidance process to support their children in the past are now being targeted as potential clients in their own right - who can be helped by the Careers Wales Gwent team to focus on their own aspirations.

Likewise many adults are coming into contact with the service as a result of Education Business Links, which bring the school and the workplace closer together.

The service played an increasing role in the health of the local economy through the creation of its Workplace Development Team, which works with employers to identify opportunities to raise the skills of their staff - particularly at NVQ levels 2 and 3.

This work has also enabled the service to build relationships with employers, and cultivate further beneficial links between them and local schools.

Not only does the service help people identify the employment and training opportunities available, but it equips them with the very practical skills needed to pursue those opportunities.

Said Trina: "Looking for a job is becoming a very sophisticated business. Most of us are going to need some help. That includes helping people to present their portfolio of skills in a clear and effective way.

"Increasingly we are moving away from jobs being restricted by age or specific qualifications. We are in a more flexible world where skills are quite portable. We are trying to get across to people that they can keep adding to their portfolio of skills and open up new opportunities.

"It is important that everyone builds a foundation by gaining basic and key skills such as good literacy and numeracy, good communication, teamworking and problem solving which apply in almost all jobs," she added.

Nowhere have the wide ranging skills of Careers Wale Gwent advisers been more evident than in the Youth Gateway programme, which gives crucial support to young people around school leaving age who find difficulty in deciding which path to choose next or who cannot get the opening they seek.

Through information, advice, practical coaching in CVs or interview skills, plus confidence building and making contacts, the team - based in three regional centres - has helped unlock opportunities for large numbers of teenagers who might otherwise have begun to drift and miss out on employment or further learning.

Another major boost to young people is the Dynamo Project, managed by Careers Wales Gwent on behalf of the WDA, which is designed to open teenagers eyes to the world of enterprise.

Scores of dynamic "role models" who have set up and run successful businesses are going into schools to share with youngsters the joys and the realities of this kind of career.

This, say Careers staff, is "going down a bomb" with pupils, many of whom who are now readily adding enterprise to the range of serious options open to them when they set off on life's path.