Thank you to Büşra Kulakoğlu, who is a communications volunteer for work group 2, for writing this blog post and a recording of the webinar can be found at the end of the post.

On 14 April 2026, WG2 of COCAG held its third webinar featuring a panel session on career guidance policy. Moderated by Dr. Tibor B. Borbély-Pecze and Dr. Petra Elftorp, the session brought together four speakers whose presentations approached the topic from distinct yet closely connected angles. Taken together, the panel moved across time in a productive way from the present tensions in career, to the past conditions that form the self, to children’s imagined futures, and finally to the question of how career guidance policy might be transformed through justice and sustainability. What emerged was a shared challenge to narrow understandings of career guidance as a purely individual matter. Instead, the discussion showed that career guidance is deeply social, political, and moral.

The Present: Tensions Between Individual Choice and Collective Need

Jouke Post opened the panel by asking what constitutes a good career. Rather than treating career choice as a simple matter of personal preference, his presentation emphasized that careers unfold at the intersection of individual aspirations and collective conditions. A career is shaped not only by what one wants, but also by labour-market demands, changing social needs, crisis conditions, and the pressures of economic transformation. This creates a persistent tension between the individual and the collective.

Post described this challenge through the idea of responsiveness. In his framing, a responsive career path is one that can adequately and in a timely way respond to signals, changes, and needs in a particular field of work. This is especially relevant in periods marked by disruption, including the aftermath of the pandemic, technological change, and sectoral shortages. Some forms of work become newly valued, while others are destabilized. Under such conditions, career development cannot be understood outside the wider structures in which it takes place.

What made this contribution particularly important was its policy relevance. If responsiveness is becoming a central feature of contemporary work, then career guidance and human resource systems must do more than support individual decision-making. They must also help people navigate moral and social tensions between personal choice and collective need. This leaves us with an important question: How can policy support autonomy while also taking seriously the demands of the labor market and the public good? Post’s presentation suggested that theory, policy, and practice should not be separated here. They need to think together.

The Past: Spinoza, Dependence, and the Emotional Conditions of Becoming

João Coelho added a deeper philosophical layer to the discussion by turning to Spinoza and the emotional and moral dimensions of human formation. If the first presentation focused on the present realities of career choice, Coelho’s contribution asked us to look backward but not in a nostalgic sense, rather to understand how selves are shaped through their relations with the external world. Human beings do not emerge as fully self-determining agents. They are formed through dependence, fragility, desire, and the conditions that surround them.

Drawing on Spinoza, Coelho challenged the assumption that free will alone governs career choices. The self is never the only cause of its own existence. Instead, one’s possibilities are conditioned by external environments and by the passions through which those environments are lived. In this account, there are moments in which social conditions produce what Spinoza calls sad passions. These are states in which individuals become less capable of acting, imagining, and affirming themselves. In a world of precarity, volatility, and externally imposed expectations, this idea becomes especially relevant.

This matters for career policy because it changes the question. Instead of asking only how individuals can make good choices, we must also ask what blocks their capacity to become. What conditions reduce their power to act? What forms of guidance help people understand the forces acting upon them, rather than blaming them for failing to meet impossible expectations? Coelho’s presentation brought much-needed depth to the discussion by reminding us that career development is not only economic or institutional. It is also emotional, relational, and moral.

The Future: Children’s Career Imaginaries and the Early Formation of Aspiration

Aisling Murray Fleming shifted the discussion toward the future through research with primary school children in Ireland. Her presentation was especially striking because it showed how early career imaginaries begin to form. Conducted in the context of Ireland’s first national strategic framework for guidance and alongside wider curriculum reform, the research explored how children aged five to nine imagine jobs, work, and future life paths.

The findings were both impressive, and revealing. Almost all of the children were able to articulate a specific future occupation, often through drawings as well as discussion. Yet these ideas did not come from nowhere. They were shaped by family conversations, classroom interactions, media exposure, popular culture, and the immediate social environment. Even at these early ages, children had developed quite fixed ideas about who they might become. Gender patterns were also already visible with girls and boys often clustering around different aspirations, even when some professions such as medicine or law appeared more balanced.

The policy significance of this work is profound. It suggests that career learning starts much earlier than formal guidance systems often assume. It also shows that aspiration is socially produced, not individually invented. If children’s horizons are being shaped from the earliest years by gender norms, classed environments, and cultural narratives, then career guidance policy must be connected to curriculum, pedagogy, and wider educational cultures. Fleming’s contribution pushed the discussion beyond employability and toward a broader understanding of how futures are imagined, limited, or expanded long before young people formally enter the labor market.

Shifting Traditional Career Guidance Patterns: Environmental Justice, Sustainability and the Transformation of Career Guidance

Sakine Sincer brought the panel to a powerful close by arguing that career guidance should not be reduced to employability. Her presentation challenged traditional approaches that frame career development primarily as an individual project aimed at securing employment. While such approaches often emphasize personal success, they can overlook the structural inequalities that shape who has access to opportunities, whose aspirations are supported, and whose transitions are made more difficult by systemic barriers.

In response, Sincer proposed a shift toward a more socially responsible and sustainability-oriented understanding of career guidance. Rather than treating guidance as neutral, she emphasized that it is always embedded in social and political structures. Career guidance can reproduce inequality if it ignores socioeconomic barriers, access disparities, and the ethical dimensions of work. However, it can also become a tool for transformation if it is designed as a support system within education and society rather than merely a mechanism for matching individuals to jobs.

Her use of environmental justice as a lens was particularly productive. Through the dimensions of distribution, recognition, and participation, she asked us to consider how benefits and burdens are shared, whose experiences are acknowledged or ignored, and whose voices count and whose are silenced in shaping decisions. This reframes career guidance as part of a larger struggle over equality, mobility, sustainability, and democratic inclusion. In that sense, leadership also becomes central here which is not simply administrative leadership, but equity-focused leadership capable of transforming career systems toward more just and responsible futures.

Conclusion

What made this panel so compelling was not simply the diversity of topics, but the way the presentations spoke to one another. Together, they showed that career guidance cannot be understood as a neutral or purely individual process. It is shaped by labor-market shifts, by emotional and moral conditions, by early childhood socialization, and by wider structures of inequality and recognition. In that sense, career guidance policy is not only about helping people choose. It is about how societies organize possibility.

Across the panel, a common lesson emerged: If career guidance is to remain meaningful in the present, it must be responsive without being reduced to labor-market responsiveness alone, reflective without losing sight of practice, and future-oriented without ignoring justice. That is perhaps the most important challenge for career guidance policy that emerged from the discussions on 14 April. Career guidance is not only about preparing individuals for work. It is about imagining what kinds of lives, institutions, and futures we are willing to support. For WG2, as the working group focused on policy, this discussion pointed to a central responsibility which is ensuring that career guidance policy remains responsive not only to labor-market needs, but also to questions of justice, sustainability, and collective wellbeing. Theory helps us understand the problem, and practice shows how it is lived, but policy is what can create broader and more lasting change.

We warmly thank all panelists and participants for making this discussion so thought-provoking. We are especially grateful to Dr. Tibor B. Borbély-Pecze and Dr. Petra Elftorp for their generous and insightful moderation.