Career guidance policy: an international review.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, and the European Commission have conducted reviews of the career guidance policies and practices in 37 countries. The 37 country studies, together with the 3 synthesis reports and a number of other commissioned papers, constitute the largest database on career guidance policies that has ever been collected. The present article, based in large part on the 3 synthesis reports, addresses the finding relative to 5 key policy issues: rationale, evidence, delivery, resources, and leadership.

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Public policy is not of immediate and intrinsic interest to most career guidance practitioners. What draws them to this work and what inspires and motivates them are not policy goals but a concern for helping people. They are interested in people as individuals, not in political agendas. This, arguably, is right and as it should be. But, of course, public policy is crucial to career guidance work. Most career guidance services in most countries are paid for by governments, whether at the national, regional, or local level. A few countries have experimented with the possibility of moving, at least in part, toward more market-based models in which individuals (especially adults) pay, but even this is a policy decision. If career guidance services are to be developed for all, on a lifelong basis, the active and convinced support of policy makers is essential. If the career guidance profession is to achieve this support, it must learn to talk their language and address their concerns.

Internationally, career guidance is now higher on the public policy agenda than ever before. The last 3 years have seen overlapping policy reviews in this area by three influential international organizations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), based in Paris, conducted a Career Guidance Policy Review that involved 14 countries (OECD, 2004). The World Bank then decided to use an adapted form of the OECD process to conduct a parallel review in seven middle-income countries (Watts & Fretwell, 2004). Finally, the European Commission, as part of its policy work on lifelong learning, decided to use the OECD questionnaire to collect information on all the existing and new European Union member states that had not been involved in the OECD review and produced a report covering career guidance policies across the European Union as a whole (Sultana, 2004).

Together, these OECD, World Bank, and EC reviews cover 37 countries. The 37 country studies, together with the three synthesis reports and a number of other commissioned papers, constitute the largest database on career guidance policies that has ever been; the review process has also, in several countries, had a considerable impact in its own right. The core documents are on two Web sites: www.oecd.org and www.crccanada.org/symposium. The present article, based on the synthesis of the three reviews (Watts & Sultana, 2004), addresses five key policy issues: rationale, evidence, delivery, resources, and leadership.

Rationale

In most countries, policy makers clearly regard career guidance services as being of value not only to the individuals who engage with them but to society as a whole. In other words, they represent not only a private good but also a public good. This is a crucial argument. If career guidance services were only a private good, then it could be argued that the provision of such services should be left to the market: If individuals want them, they should pay for them. It is because they are also perceived as a public good that governments become interested in them and are prepared to support them financially and in other ways.

The public policy goals that policy makers expect career guidance services to address fall into three main categories. The first goals are learning goals, including improving the efficiency of the education and training system and managing its interface with the labor market. If individuals make decisions about what they are to learn in a well-informed and well-thought-through way, linked to their interests, their capacities, and their aspirations, the huge sums of money invested in education and training systems are likely to yield much higher returns. The second goals are labor market goals, including improving the match between supply and demand and managing adjustments to change. If people find jobs that use their potential and meet their own goals, they are likely to be more motivated and therefore more productive. The third goals are social equity goals, including supporting equal opportunities and promoting social inclusion. Career guidance services can raise the aspirations of members of disadvantaged groups and support them in obtaining access to opportunities that might other wise have been denied to them.

The precise nature of these three sets of goals--and the balance between and within these categories--varies across countries. In addition, these goals are currently being radically reframed in the light of policies relating to lifelong learning, which are linked to active labor market policies and the concept of sustained employability.

I believe that this is closely linked to a paradigm shift (Jarvis, 2003) in the nature of work and career. I have called this shift a "careerquake" (Watts, 1996) and have referred to it as "the death and transfiguration of career" (Collin & Watts, 1996). In the Industrial Era, the dominant concept of career was progression up an ordered hierarchy within an organization or profession. People talked about choosing their career, as though they then entered it and simply allowed it to unfold in an orderly way. It was a bureaucratic concept. It was also an elitist concept: Some had careers; many only had jobs; some did not even have that.

Now, however, that concept is fragmenting. The pace of change, driven by technology and globalization, means that organizations are constantly exposed to change. They are therefore less willing to make long-term commitments to individuals; when they do, it must be in exchange for task and role flexibility. Either way, therefore, security lies not in employment but in employability. Individuals who want to maintain their employability must be willing to learn new skills regularly.

Bezanson (2003) has defined the transformed concept of career as "the lifelong process of managing learning and work in order to live and work with purpose and create a quality life" (p. 9). Careers are no longer chosen; they are constructed through the series of choices all individuals make throughout their lives. Career development in this sense need not be confined to the few; it could be accessible to all. The task of policy makers, working with career guidance practitioners, is to help make it so.

Indeed, career guidance is crucial to the success of lifelong learning policies. Governments regularly state that such policies need to be significantly driven by individuals. The reason is simple: Schooling can be designed as a system, but lifelong learning cannot. It needs to embrace many forms of learning, in many different settings. It is the individual who must provide the sense of impetus, of coherence, and of continuity.

This places career guidance center stage. It means that if, as many governments believe, lifelong learning is crucial to their countries' economic competitiveness and social well-being, then their countries' future is significantly dependent on the quality of the decisions and transitions made by individuals.

This is reflected in recent OECD (2002) work on human capital, which suggested that the career management skills that are now a growing focus of career guidance policies and practices may play an important role in economic growth. The report pointed out that less than half of earnings variation in OECD countries can be accounted for by educational qualifications and readily measurable skills. It argued that a significant part of the remainder might be explained by people's ability to build, and to manage, their skills. Included in these are career planning, job search and other career-management skills. Seen in this perspective, career guidance services have the potential to contribute significantly to national policies for the development of human capital. The fact that such an authoritative and influential organization as OECD is viewing career guidance in these terms is very significant.

Accordingly, countries are increasingly recognizing the need to expand access to career guidance services so that these services are available not just to selected groups, like school leavers and the unemployed, but to everyone throughout his or her life. This universal and lifelong perspective is arguably the key point to emerge from the reviews, with huge implications. It requires not just expansion but transformation. If the expanded access that is required were to be achieved solely through public services and such traditional methods as face-to-face interviews linked to psychometric testing, there would inevitably be a massive increase in costs. A new paradigm requires different approaches. Efforts are, therefore, being made to diversify the methods and sources of provision and to seek innovative and more streamlined forms of service delivery. In particular, there is a move toward self-help approaches, including approaches designed to help individuals develop the skills of managing their own careers. These trends are supported by recent trends in career development theory, which emphasize that career guidance should be available throughout life, should be viewed as a learning experience, and should help people to construct their lives.

Evidence

The philosophical case for enhanced career guidance services is therefore a powerful one and is attracting influential advocacy. But the demands on public expenditure are many, and policy makers want to see benefits from their bucks. Of course, policy making is not a wholly rational business. A recent history of careers services in England (Peck, 2004) quoted a civil servant as saying that there are two things in life that one should not see being made: One is sausages, the other is public policy. So hard evidence on outcomes from career guidance services may not be sufficient. But it is certainly necessary, to support the case.

In these terms, there is substantial evidence concerning the learning outcomes that individuals derive from career guidance interventions. This evidence is important, because in general these interventions are concerned not with telling people what to do but with helping them acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will help them make better career choices and transitions. The evidence is also congruent with the growing attention to the development of career management skills.

Concerning behavioral outcomes, there is growing evidence of positive outcomes in terms of the impact on participation in learning and in work, although more such studies are needed. However, concerning long-term benefits in terms of success or satisfaction--to which key policy outcomes in terms of economic and social benefits are linked--few adequate studies have yet been conducted. The methodological difficulties and cost implications of the long-term longitudinal studies that would be required are formidable. There is a case for a major international initiative, possibly linked to continuing OECD work on human capital, to determine what is feasible in this respect and to implement it. Meanwhile, it can be concluded that the available evidence on the benefits of career guidance services is not comprehensive, but that what exists is very positive.

Delivery

The review reports went on to examine the delivery of career guidance services in relation to the changing rationale outlined above. They demonstrated that no country had yet developed an adequate lifelong guidance system. But all countries have examples of good practice, and across the range of countries these indicate what such a system might look like--recognizing that in terms of its detail, it will take different forms in different countries. The key points can be grouped under 13 headings.

The first is the growing recognition of the importance of career education and guidance in schools, not only in helping young people make the immediate choices that confront them but also in laying the foundations for lifelong learning and lifelong career development. This is evident, for example, in the inclusion in many countries of career education in the curriculum, incorporating career awareness, career exploration, and the development of career management skills that will enable individuals to construct their careers. Career education can be a separate subject, or subsumed into a broader subject, or infused across the curriculum (although the infusion approach is difficult to implement successfully); alternatively, it may be provided in the form of seminars and workshops. Such programs are greatly enriched when they include the active involvement of employers, parents, and other stakeholders and opportunities for pupils to engage in experiential learning (e.g., "course tasters," or sampling) and active experiences of the world of work through visits, simulation, job shadowing, or actual work experience. The longer term perspective is also evident in the introduction of profiling and portfolio systems designed to encourage students to engage in regular review and planning and to manage their own learning.

Second, there is a risk of career education and guidance in schools being marginalized within a broad concept of guidance. Many countries have guidance counselors who have a holistic role that covers personal and social as well as educational and vocational guidance, as in the United States. In countries with such systems, the reviews found consistent evidence that career guidance in schools tended to be marginalized in two respects: First, the pressing nature of the personal and behavioral problems of a minority of pupils meant that guidance counselors spent much of their time on these problems, at the expense of the help needed by all pupils in relation to their educational and vocational choices; second, guidance on such choices tended to focus mainly on educational decisions viewed as ends in themselves rather than on their vocational implications and on longer term career planning. These findings raise the question of whether the career guidance role might be split off, both to protect its resources and to address its distinctive competence requirements, including knowledge of the labor market.

Third, it is clear that alongside career education and guidance in the school itself, there is merit in making career guidance available in a specialist form from the employment service or some other agency based outside the school--as is the case, for example, in Germany and the United Kingdom. Such an agency can offer closer links with the labor market and stronger assurance of impartiality in the guidance it provides.

Fourth, in many countries, there has been a growing policy concern for at-risk young people who have dropped out of formal education and training with few or no qualifications and who are drifting in and out of unemployment, labor-market inactivity, and marginal unskilled work. Successful strategies for working with these young people involve a highly individualized approach that attends to their personal and social as well as their educational and vocational guidance needs.

Fifth, it is evident that in several countries career guidance services in tertiary education are inadequate. Ironically, career development roles within education tend, in many countries, to be least strongly professionalized in higher education, which is the sector responsible for much of the professional training in the field as a whole. In some countries, such guidance as is available is confined largely to choice of studies; the assumption seems to be that students can manage their own transitions into the labor market without any support. This assumption may have been sustainable when their student body consisted of a small academic elite, who normally entered a narrow field of work related to their studies. It is much less defensible when the number of students is much larger and more diverse and when the links between their studies and the fields open to them are much more complex.

Sixth, there is a need for enhanced career guidance services to be provided in the workplace by employers for their employees. These services can include career planning workshops and regular review and planning processes, paralleling those within education. Career guidance services tend to be stronger in large organizations than in small and medium-sized enterprises. Although employers' interests may impose constraints on the impartiality of such services, they are an important part of the provision of lifelong career guidance. There is also interest in a number of countries in the role of trade unions in providing career guidance services for their members.

Seventh, because help provided by employers is likely to be restricted to career guidance that meets their interests as well as those of the individual and because, at times, these interests may conflict, there is a strong case for integrating public employment services more closely into lifelong learning strategies, in general, and strategies for lifelong access to career guidance, in particular. Huge public resources are concentrated in such services. These resources tend at present to be targeted narrowly at particular groups (notably the unemployed) and short-term goals (immediate employment and removal from the benefit system), but they could be transformed into well-publicized career guidance services for all, helping people to sustain their employability and respond flexibly to change.

Eighth, career guidance can have a particularly dynamic role to play in adult education. Some access provision (i.e., programs designed to facilitate access) for people returning to learning or to work includes strong career guidance elements. Again, procedures for accreditation and recognition of prior learning can develop into a career guidance dialogue, in which individuals are helped not only to identify the knowledge and competencies they have acquired informally but also to explore new opportunities to which they might be transferable. Career guidance services can also be used to improve the responsiveness of educational institutions to the needs of consumers through advocacy on their behalf and through feedback to providers on their unmet needs.

Ninth, a life stage when current provision is particularly inadequate is the "third age." Many countries are expressing growing concerns about their aging populations and difficulties in funding adequate pensions and the consequent need to encourage people to stay in the labor force longer. There is also growing interest in encouraging those who have left the labor market to continue their involvement in learning and in voluntary work in the community, thereby reducing health bills and harnessing their social contribution. However, no country has yet systematically addressed the potential role of career guidance services in these various respects and, more generally, in helping individuals to manage more gradual and more flexible approaches to "retirement."

Tenth, good-quality career information is essential for good-quality career guidance services and good-quality career decision making. Governments have an important role to play in funding the collection, publication, and distribution of career information. Even when information is produced by others, they should also seek to ensure its quality. Too much career information is driven by producer needs rather than consumer needs.

Eleventh, if information is absolutely necessary, information alone is absolutely not sufficient. If individuals are to be able to find the information they need, to understand this information and relate it to their personal needs, and then to convert it into personal action, many will need some form of personal support, including counseling. Some such help, however, can be provided at a distance. There is much scope for using help lines and Web-based services to extend access to career guidance services and for integrating such services more creatively with face-to-face services.

Twelfth, there is scope to redesign the physical facilities of all career guidance services on a self-help basis. It is now becoming increasingly common for a variety of resources based on information and communication technologies and other resources to be on open access, with clear signposting, and with specialist career counselors being available for brief support as well as for longer counseling interviews. Diagnostic help can then be provided on reception to help clients decide whether they can operate on a self-help basis, need brief staff assistance, or require intensive professional help.

Finally, an important policy issue is whether career guidance services should be designed on an all-age or age-specific basis. Age-specific services enable attention to be focused on the distinctive needs of the age group in question. In contrast, all-age services have a number of organizational and resource-use advantages. Potentially, these advantages allow them to be more cost-effective, thereby avoiding unnecessary duplication of resources.

Resources

Concerning staffing, there is a need for stronger occupational structures in the career guidance field. In many countries, the current structures are weak compared with the structures in related professions. Many services are provided by people who provide them for only part of their time (the rest being devoted to teaching, job placement, or guidance on personal or study problems) and little appropriate training. Often, qualifications from apparently related fields--such as teaching and psychology--seem to be regarded as proxies for career guidance qualifications, without any verification of whether or not they ensure the requisite competencies. Career guidance strategies can include delivery through others--teachers and mentors of various kinds, for example; there is also a need for wider use of trained support staff. But clarity is needed about the role of career guidance professionals within such diversified delivery systems. Their training should include consultancy and management roles and embrace the types of cost-effective and flexible delivery methods that can widen access to services.

To support the provision of such diversified training, there is also a need for competence frameworks that can embrace, but also differentiate, a variety of career guidance roles--and provide a career development structure for guidance staff themselves. The Canadian Standards and Guidelines for Career Development Practitioners are of particular interest. They have strongly influenced the international standards recently developed by the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance, which provide a useful reference point for such processes in other countries.

Regarding funding, policy options include devolving funding either to regions and localities as part of decentralization or to individual educational institutions. This can result in stronger local ownership and customization of services but can also produce wide variation in their level and quality. Devolution to institutions, for example, risks that decisions regarding the extent and nature of service provision will be based on institutional interests rather than on the needs of individuals or of the wider economy. Steps that can be taken to address such risks include staffing formulas, performance contracts, and legislation-based entitlements: All, however, need to be backed up by enforcement devices.

Some governments have contracted out a range of employment services, including career guidance services. Contracting out services can result in cheaper services and, particularly in the case of the voluntary, community-based sector, in services that are more closely attuned to the needs of particular groups. It can also, though, result in services that are fragmented. Alternatively, a few countries have piloted voucher schemes in which funding is channeled through the clients, who can use their voucher to "buy" the service from a provider of their choice.

Contracts and vouchers can also be linked to stimulate private markets for career guidance service delivery. There are strong markets in a number of countries in career publishing, in placement agencies, and in outplacement services. But, in general, markets for career guidance per se are supported largely by contracted-out public employment services and by employers. Only in a few countries is there much evidence of a market in career guidance services supported by fees paid by individuals themselves, and even in these countries, this market is still limited. It is as yet unclear whether this is a transitional problem, linked to users being accustomed to such services being free, or a systemic problem, based on difficulties in treating career guidance services as a commodity in the ways that a market would require.

In all countries, more information is needed on the extent and potential of these markets. Because career guidance is widely viewed as a public as well as a private good, the roles of government in relation to a mixed-economy model of provision would seem to be threefold: to stimulate the market (through contracts and incentives) in order to build its capacity; to ensure that it is quality assured, both to protect the public interest and to build consumer confidence; and to compensate for market failure by addressing needs that the market cannot meet, when this is viewed as being in the public interest.

Leadership

Governments have an important role in providing strategic leadership. But they need to do so in association with other stakeholders: education and training providers, employers, trade unions, community agencies, students, parents, other consumers, and career guidance practitioners.

Evidence and data are important tools for policy making. Stronger infrastructures are required to build up the evidence base for both policy and practice and to do so cumulatively so that experience is not wasted and mistakes repeated. This base should include evidence on users, on client needs, on which services are delivered to whom, on the costs of services (on which remarkably little information is available at present), and on the immediate and longer term outcomes of career guidance interventions. The limited extent of such data at present is due to the absence of an accountability culture among professional career guidance staff and to the lack of pressure from policy makers to collect the data. Some of the information should be collected on a routine basis; some requires sophisticated studies. To date, few countries have established specialist career guidance research centers or research programs to develop the knowledge base in a systemic way. There is also a need for chairs of university departments to provide status and intellectual leadership for the field: Many countries have no such university chairs at present.

Legislation can be another instrument for steering career guidance services. It plays an important role in this respect in some countries, but none at all in others. Where legislation exists, it tends to be general in nature. Much of it is sector specific: Denmark is a rare example of a country that has a specific career guidance act covering all sectors. The value of legislation as a policy steering tool would be increased if it was used to define clients' entitlements.

A need is evident in many countries for stronger coordination and leadership mechanisms to articulate a vision and develop a strategy for delivering lifelong access to career guidance services. Such mechanisms are required within government, where responsibility for these services is often fragmented across a number of ministries and branches. Strong cooperation between education and employment portfolios is particularly important: for example, to ensure that educational and occupational information is integrated and that a strong labor market perspective is included in schools' career guidance programs.

Coordinating mechanisms are also needed more broadly at national and provincial levels, to bring together the relevant stakeholder groups and the various career guidance professional bodies (which in some countries are somewhat fragmented). Parallel mechanisms are then required at the local level, closer to the point of delivery.

An important focus for such collaborative action is identifying gaps in services and developing action plans for filling them. Another is the development of strategic instruments that can be operationally useful across the whole range of the career guidance field and hold it together. Competence frameworks for career guidance practitioners along the lines already mentioned are one. Another focus for collaborative action is organizational quality standards, covering how individuals are helped and how services are managed: These can be voluntary in nature but can also be made mandatory for organizations in receipt of public funding. A third type of instrument, developed in Canada and drawing from earlier work in the United States, is the Blueprint for Life/Work Designs: a list of the competencies that career guidance programs aim to develop among clients at different stages of their lives, with accompanying performance indicators. The systematic publication of data linked to such indicators could provide a way of introducing more coherent accountability across a coordinated career guidance system. Together, these three instruments could coordinate the range of provision, particularly if they could be linked to common branding and marketing of services.

The key point here is the need to view career guidance services within each country as a coherent system. In reality, of course, they are not a single system. Rather, they are a collection of disparate subsystems, including services in schools, in tertiary education, in public employment services, and in the private and voluntary sectors. Each of these is a minor part of some wider system, with its own rationale and driving forces. From the lifelong perspective of the individual, it is important that services should be as seamless as possible. If career guidance systems are to play their role in national strategies for lifelong learning linked to sustained employability, it is essential that a holistic vision be articulated, sustained, and collectively owned by a council or other structure with the breadth and strength of membership to implement the vision. This is why stronger strategic leadership structures are so necessary.

Conclusion

Career guidance services have often, in the past, been viewed as marginal services in terms of public policy. Three influential international organizations have now affirmed that this view is no longer adequate. Instead, such services need now to be brought into the mainstream of policy formation.

One of the outcomes of the three reviews is to be the establishment of an International Center for Career Development and Public Policy. The need for such a center emerged from two international symposia held in Canada in 1999 and 2001 (Bezanson & O'Reilly, 2002; Hiebert & Bezanson, 2000), which significantly influenced the reviews. It is hoped that the center will sustain the momentum established by the reviews and harness the benefits from continued international sharing in meeting the challenges that all countries face.

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A. G. Watts, National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling, Cambridge, England. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to A. G. Watts, 3 Summerfield, Cambridge CB3 9HE, England (e-mail: [e-mail]).