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Career guidance and counselling (CGC) plays an important role in the ‘egalitarian tradition’ of the Nordic countries’ perspective of education, since it aims to support all students in developing skills and knowledge to access further education and the labour market. Inspired by the critical institutionalism approach and focusing on education aimed at migrant students, this article explores the strategies that school actors implement to cope with the discrepancies between CGC policy and practice by analysing two cases: one in adult vocational education and training in Finland and the other in the Language Introduction Programme in Sweden. The ecological framework facilitates an understanding of the complex policy – practice dynamics within the local learning ecologies while also opening up a discussion on their implications for migrant students’ opportunities for social inclusion. The findings show how the shortcomings of the policy – practice relationship affect teachers’ and counsellors’ work, and how students consequently may end up relying on self and peer support.

This article sets out the findings of a systematic review on research into career guidance policy in the Nordic countries between 2008 and 2022. In total 60 papers were reviewed from across the Nordic region. They focused on national career guidance systems, career guidance systems for young people, the adult guidance system and career guidance for migrants. The corpus proved to be methodologically diverse with studies utilizing a wide range of different research strategies, although important differences were found between academic and grey literature. Most of the papers reviewed were atheoretical, with the remaining, mainly academic, literature drawing heavily on critical theory. The thematic analysis identified four major themes in the corpus: the context for career guidance policy; career guidance provision and practice; technologies of governance; and beneficiaries and outcomes of career guidance policies. The findings are discussed in relation to the strengths and weakness of the corpus and used to propose a research programme for the next 15 years.