Persuasive communication in vocational development.

Last week I worked at an exhibition called Skills Masters. During three days students compete to become the best cook, electrician, mechanic etc. Each stand represent a trade or business and so I had to work on the OBIT stand, what represent the installation trade. Several MBO and VMBO students fight to be the best heating installer, roof builder, bathroom installer etc of the Netherlands. During this competition the exhibition is visited by schools and their students. These students are between 12 and 15 years old and have to choose their study direction. The Skills Masters exhibition shows all possible studies and every exhibitor tries to inform and persuade the students to choose the presented studies.
Students visit the exhibition with their school and will separated in groups of 10 persons. Every group get a ‘tour guide’ and these guides ensure that the students will visit all stands. At each stand there are employees who will guide the students through the stand and tell them about the studies represented.  It sounds like a very good an useful method to inform the students about the study opportunities they have, but there seems to be a contradiction between reality and theory.

However, to communicate you need a sender and a receiver. Walking on the exhibition you can see that all senders did their work very well, but their success depends on the interaction between sender and receiver, so the receiver is really important to succeed. During my work on the exhibition it was clear to me that most of the receivers are not interested in the information and are not listening to the tour guides. A small amount of information the exhibitor want to communicate to the students will be received and so all the effort has less success.  All these companies and trade representatives tries to inform and persuade the children, they put a lot of effort in the exhibition but what will be the outcome of all this? In my opinion the outcome of the exhibition is minimal, simply because it seems the receiver is not interested in the information.