Pete Robertson is Associate Professor of Career Guidance at Edinburgh Napier University. In this article he discusses the need to broaden the range of policy goals that we seek to connect career guidance to. The article draws on a recently published chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Career Development entitled The Aims of Career Development Policy: Towards a Comprehensive Framework. 

In the early years of the 21^st Century we saw great steps forward in developing an understanding of career guidance as an arena for policy action. Through the work of the International Centre for Career Development in Public Policy ICCDPP, we came to understand that career guidance is substantially shaped by government policy.  A great achievement of the guidance community was to achieve the recognition of international bodies, such as the OECD, the World Bank, the European Union and its agencies. This interest has been sustained:  last year CEDEFOP published a document supported by a range of international organisations making a positive case for investing in career guidance.

Existing policy goals for career guidance

A feature of policy studies is that it lends itself to international comparisons, and a number of comparative surveys have been undertaken. This has led to a shared understanding of what it is that governments are trying to achieve when they intervene in the career development of their citizens, and invest in career guidance services. Three types of aims emerged from these studies:

Economic aims:  To contribute to the functioning of the economy, and the efficient allocation of human resources in the labour market.

Educational aims:  To contribute to the efficient functioning of the education system, to support transitions, and the interface between the education system and the labour market.

Social equity aims:  To promote fairness in society in access to opportunities between social categories (e.g. in terms of gender and ethnicity). 

New policy goals for career guidance

The goals set out above are persuasive and are backed up by evidence from international reviews. My argument is that they are good, but we can build on them. The three aims identified by policy scholars are an excellent description of what is, but not a complete understand of what could be.  Whilst accepting the value of the work that has already been done, we can imagine a wider range of possible policy contributions for career guidance, including those that no government has yet adopted. 

To do this we need some systematic way of understanding the range of policy goals that governments should consider, and ideally a system that is not narrowly focused on one nation, culture or economic system.  Fortunately, there is a framework that allows us to do this –  the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – and it provides a taxonomy of 17 goals that are relevant to all nations. 

But not all of the 17 goals are fully relevant to career guidance, as the framework addresses a wide scope of government priorities.  We can collapse the framework down to a smaller, manageable number of goals. This allows us to retain the three we have already established are important: economic, educational and social equity goals.  The added value in applying the frameworks is that it enables us to see three additional policy goals that are relevant to career guidance but have been largely ignored. These are:

Health and well-being goals:  Work and careers are profoundly linked to mental and physical health. We know, for example, there is a strong association between unemployment and detriments to mental health. Career guidance can help people to access healthy work, and help people to develop life goals, a sense of identity, and a positive focus on the future. This is an area I have explored, for example in relation to the impact of career guidance on the mental well-being of young people.

Environmental goals:  Climate change, environmental degradation, and natural resources feature prominently in the UN sustainable development goals. These issues become increasingly pressing and difficult for governments to ignore. Career guidance has a role to play in supporting the transition to a green economy. A number of people have been exploring the area of ‘green guidance’ and CERIC have collated a climate change and career development literature search.

Peace and justice goals:  Supporting individuals to develop career objectives, and to engage with work and learning may help with the rehabilitation of offenders and it may help to prevent people being drawn into illegal activity in the first place. At a societal level, a peaceful and harmonious society is likely to be undermined if career opportunities are not accessible and fairly distributed.  This is an area that is almost entirely neglected, so there is a lack of research to support the role of career services in promoting peace and justice. 

We now have six broad goals. Crucially social justice is not limited to the goal that relates directly to social equity; it cuts across all six goals. Socio-economically disadvantaged groups are facing inequalities in: 

• accessing decent work
• getting outcomes from the education system
• health outcomes (mortality and morbidity)
• avoiding impacts of climate change and environmental degradation
• engagement with the criminal justice system

A social justice agenda should therefore remain central to public policy for career development.  We support individuals to build sustainable lifestyles, and we can act positively to facilitate social change in line with these objectives.