Em & En Dashes - Adobe Indesign

Hi Everyone

I'm working on a 40 page Course Guide and got the first proof back
from the client who said they need to have all the dashes changed to
longer or shorter dashes where they were specifically required. For
example, the dash in this line:

Nursing Certificate Course - 4109A
will require a longer dash, whereas:

Co-ordinator
will require a shorter dash.

I ran a Find/Replace and had ALL the dashes changed to a longer one. I
then ran a Find/Replace with *-* in the Find text box (where the
asterisks are indicative of a wild character, which words in search
engines on the net), which I thought would rule out all instances of
dashes being recognised with a space immediately before and after the
dash, which didn't work. InDesign could not find a match.

I then resorted to the Help Menu and found this:
Metacharacters represent a character or symbol in InDesign.
Metacharacters begin with a caret (^). You can use the following
metacharacters in the Find/Change dialog box:
(of which em and en dashes are featured)

Okay, so I went to the Find/Replace function and entered ˆ= but got
Could Not Find Match. (to get this character I used Alt+I).
I'm obviously doing something wrong here so I would really appreciate
it if anyone could help me replace all the long dashes that are
infecting the words with a dash within the word itself. I don't want
to rely on proof-reading as this will (a) take a long time, and (b) is
liable to error.

Many thanks in advance for your assistance here,
CL8'N