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This article explores how UK students and recent graduates experience the process of transitioning to the labour market, based on a secondary analysis of 1969 survey responses from current students and recent graduates using an online jobs board. It finds that gender, class and ethnicity all structure students' experience of transition in a multitude of ways. The article reports 24 aspects of the transition process with statistically significant differences between students from different demographic backgrounds. These include students' vocational focus and career aspirations, mobility, values, the social aspects of work, whether they feel informed about career and recruitment, how they want to communicate with employers, and their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of these differences are small, but cumulatively they suggest that demographics are shaping the process of transition in complex, intersectional and heterogeneous ways. There is a need for key stakeholders involved in this process, notably higher education careers services and employers, to attend to these differences and use them to reform the graduate transition process in ways that make it more equitable.

Despite role transitions occurring frequently within organisations, career theories have often overlooked such transitions. Here we explore the role of personal agency and organisational attachment in shaping career capital enactment within intra-organisational role transitions. We propose a new career capital usage typology. Using an interpretivist approach, the research is based within a UK construction business and explores the role transition experiences of 36 business leaders. Through an analysis of workers' career capital use we identify a new typology and groups workers as follows: Passive Worker, Company Worker, Political Worker and Career Worker. We argue that type varies in accordance with levels of personal agency and organisational attachment and that this variation in type is particularly important during intra-organisational role transitions.

Career readiness is an important short-term outcome of career guidance activities in England. This research (1) details the development of a career readiness measure and (2) tests the relationship between career guidance interventions and career readiness among secondary school students. The measure was piloted on pupils (Study 1, N = 1508) in England taking part in a career guidance pilot programme. The instrument fitted a nine-item one-factor structure. In Study 2 (N = 2240), we found further evidence the factor structure was a good fit to the data. In Study 3 (N = 5242), we tested the relationship between career guidance activities and career readiness. Greater participation in career guidance activities was significantly associated with increased career readiness. These findings have implications for policymakers and researchers.

In this paper we examine the objectives and meanings of the career guidance provided in comprehensive education as set out in discussions in the Parliament of Finland. We approach the topic through an exploration of parliamentary sessions concerning three major legislative proposals for reforming compulsory education in Finland. The premise is that the parliamentary discussions concerning guidance provided in comprehensive education reflect the rationalities that underpin guidance in different eras in Finland and elsewhere. Examining these rationalities provides a way to explore the principles which frame career guidance policy in Finland. Using the actantial model as a methodological tool, the analysis aims to discover the actantial positions in the parliamentary discussions and the interactions that emerge between these. The various actantial narratives demonstrate the way in which guidance is influenced by wider ideological trends. The actantial analysis portrays a shift from the more structural corporatist approaches of the 1960s when the object of guidance was to fulfil the needs of society, towards more third way individualism in 1990s. The current reform of 2020 to extend compulsory education and reinforce guidance may represent some return to more structural approaches.

In this article I explore what the work of Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri has to offer career theory and models. There is value to engaging with key concepts from these political economists to inform and expand career guidance's capability to support social justice. The argument is made that the concepts offer novel and valuable resources for the development of career theory. These concepts are applied to undertake a reflexive re-reading of Ali and Graham's counselling approach to career guidance.

Norway is reforming its career guidance system. This article explores how these reforms are experienced in schools around Norway, and attends to the way in which the concept of "career" is understood. There is a difference between an "everyday" and a scholarly understanding of the concept, between seeing it as hierarchical, or viewing career more democratically. This study explores how these tensions are worked through by Norwegian young people and guidance counsellors. The article argues that this tension is pronounced because the concept of "career" has entered Norway as part of a top down policy discourse. Consequently, there is a need to re-contextualise the ideas of career and career guidance to connect them with Norwegian culture.

In this article, we propose a framework for understanding career guidance policy. We use a systems theory approach informed by Gramscian theories of politics and power to make sense of this complexity. Firstly, we argue that career guidance policy is made by and for people and that there is a need to recognise all of the political and civil society actors involved. Secondly, we argue that policymaking comprises a series of ideological, technical and practical processes. Finally, we contend that policymaking takes place in a complex, multi-level environment which is can be described across three levels as the policy framing, middle and street level tiers.

In this article we explore Australian policymaker perspectives on the quality assurance of career development (CD) programmes in schools. We found that Australian policymakers are concerned about the quality of CD provision in schools and have a wide range of approaches that they deploy to ensure and assure quality at the school level. Quality assurance within the country is focused on the qualifications and professionalism of the people delivering career development programmes rather than on systemic or organisational quality. We also found that the range of quality assurance tools that are deployed by such policymakers varies across the different Australian jurisdictions and is influenced by geography, the size of the jurisdiction and the level of priority given to career guidance.

In this article we examine the development of career guidance in Pakistani higher education. The article is based on a literature review supplemented with new data gathered from a review of higher education institutions' websites and five case study interviews. It considers both local and global influences as relevant contexts for understanding how the development of career guidance in Pakistani higher education is taking place. Concerns about alignment between skills supply and demand provide key drivers both for the development of career guidance and for a wider higher education reform. The practice of career guidance in Pakistani higher education is shown to be lagging behind policy and will need to be strengthened by new policy, resources and indigenous theories.

Historically, responsibility for career education and guidance in English schools was shared between the school and an external careers service. The Education Act 2011 transferred responsibility for career guidance to schools and has created a need for the new role of a 'careers leader'. In this article, we report on research in 27 English state schools and multi-academy trusts where careers leadership currently exists. This research provides empirical support for a typology of careers leadership tasks and shows that the way in which these tasks are organised varies, with five models of careers leadership evident. The advantages and potential challenges of each model are outlined and implications for the training and professional development of careers leaders are discussed.

In rapidly changing employment markets, career guidance has a vital role to play in supporting people in navigating transitions between education and employment across the lifespan. In this article, the issue of quality and quality assurance in career guidance is explored. Although there is no clear agreed international understanding of what quality career guidance looks like, through a review of current approaches we identify six main areas which may be quality assured and propose a new typology of approaches to assuring quality. The article concludes with a critical consideration of the issues that quality assurance approaches in career guidance generate, highlighting the need for caution so that the pursuit of quality does not undermine the goals it seeks to achieve.

This article examines the implications of the new education, health and care (EHC) planning process for career professionals in England. The new process comes in the wake of a succession of legislation relating to young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in England. There is much to recommend the new process as it represents a shift to a more holistic and person-centred approach. However, there are four main criticisms which can be made of the new process: (1) the policy has an excessive focus on paid work as an outcome which is unrealistic (for some young people); (2) the resourcing in local authorities is too limited to successfully operationalise the policy; (3) there is a lack of clarity about the professional base delivering EHC planning (especially in relation to the career elements); and (4) the policy is too narrowly targeted. While the new legislation offers some major opportunities, realising these will be difficult. In this paper, questions are raised about the resources required to deliver these services; the responsibilities relevant to such services; and the role and scope of these services in supporting the transitions of vulnerable young people into learning and work in an environment where universal careers provision has been substantially diminished.

Teachers play an important role supporting young people to form their career identities and to make successful transitions into further learning and work. In England, there has been limited research that has looked specifically at the role of teachers and none of which has tried to establish a measure of teacher attitude toward careers work. This article details the development of the Teachers' Attitudes toward Career Learning Index, which was created to measure attitudes and engagement in career learning on teachers in England. The instrument went through a survey design process which included content validity and construct validity components. The process identified five underlying factors in teachers' attitude and engagement in careers work: (1) career learning and support practices, (2) school career strategy attitudes, (3) subject career learning attitudes, (4) career support attitudes, and (5) school career strategy practices. This process helped refined initial theoretical constructs regarding teachers' roles in careers learning.

This article analyses qualitative data gathered from a survey of career practitioners on the issue of career image (n = 355, 75% female, 89% white and 78% from the UK). Findings reveal three key themes which represent how career image relates to practitioners' values and beliefs, how practitioners make decisions about whether to address the topic in their practice and the strategies they use to address career image with their clients. Findings are discussed with reference to Watts's socio-political ideologies of guidance. The data indicate that career practitioners are often uncomfortable about discussing career image, but address it where they believe that it is important to their clients' success. While some practitioners believe the existing structures to be unjust, they generally seek to address this injustice at the individual level rather than seeking any kind of social transformation.

Return on investment (ROI) has become part of the policymaking toolkit, particularly pertinent for activities like school-based career guidance deemed optional by some policymakers. There are institutions supporting ideal ROI methods alongside an academic critique, but little research on how ROI has been applied in practice in a guidance setting. In this systematic review, we document 32 ROI studies across nine countries that address either school-based guidance or one of three congruent fields: widening participation in education, behaviour in schools and adult career guidance. We find the corpus highly heterogenous in methods and quality, leading to problems in comparability. We argue for a pragmatic approach to improving consistency and the importance of policymakers' capacity for critically reading ROI studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long history of teachers and schools being involved in the delivery of career education and guidance. As the breadth of career education and guidance activity in English schools grew throughout the twentieth century it became increasingly necessary to have an individual within the school responsible for leading and managing this activity (the careers leader). The transfer of responsibility for career guidance from local authorities to schools following the Education Act 2011 has intensified the need for this role. There have been various attempts to conceptualise and professionalise the role of careers leader and to develop appropriate training and support. This article defines the role and the rationale for the role, sets out its history and makes recommendations for the future professionalisation of the role. It is argued that this will include recognition of the role by policy, professionalisation and the development of a career structure and the development of appropriate training and CPD.

Empirical evidence attests the impact that career image has on objective career success, yet little is known of how career practitioners conceptualise and operationalise this information. This article presents the quantitative findings of an online survey of career practitioners (n = 399, 74% female, 89% white and 75% from the U.K.) exploring their attitudes and practices towards issues of appearance and attractiveness. Career practitioners who participated in this survey acknowledged that beauty, self-presentation and interpersonal skills influence career success, and 96% of them considered conversations about career image as part of their professional remit. The career practitioners felt relatively comfortable and well informed in their discussions in this arena, but would welcome further guidance and training to inform their practice. Ethical and practical implications for the profession are considered.

This article explores the way in which government policy shapes the lives of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET). In particular it examines how the concept of NEETs is set within a specific infrastructure and discourse for managing and supporting young people. The article provides a brief history of the NEET concept and NEET initiatives, before moving on to scrutinise the policies of the Coalition Government. A key distinction is made between those policies and practices that seek to prevent young people becoming NEET from those that seek to re-engage those who are NEET. It is argued that the Coalition has drawn on a similar active labour market toolkit to the previous Labour administration, but that this has been implemented with fewer resources and less co-ordination. It concludes that there is little reason to believe that Coalition policy will be any more successful than that of the previous government, and some reason to be concerned that it will lead to young people becoming more entrenched within NEET.

This article explores the issue of quality in online career mentoring. It builds on a previous evaluation of Brightside, an online mentoring system in the UK which is primarily aimed at supporting young people's transitions to further learning. The article notes that participants in Brightside's mentoring programmes reported satisfaction with their experiences, with many stating that it helped them to make decisions and to positively change their learning and career behaviours. However, the article argues that there are challenges in ensuring quality and consistency connected to both the voluntary nature of mentoring and the online mode. The article proposes a 10-point quality framework to support quality assurance, initial training and professional development for online mentors.

This article explores the relationship between students' identities, their ideas about professional appearance and their anticipated transition to the world of work. It is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with 13 students from a vocationally-focused university in England. It was found that participants viewed clothing and appearance as an important aspect of their transition to the workplace. They believed that, if carefully handled, their appearance could help them to fit in and satisfy the expectations of employers, although some participants anticipated that this process of fitting in might compromise their identity and values. The article addresses students' anticipated means of handling the tension between adapting to a new environment and "being themselves". It is argued that the way this process is handled is intertwined with wider facets of identity--most notably those associated with gender.

This article presents a critical exploration of the role of career professionals in supporting people to reflect on and enhance their appearance, attractiveness and self-presentation (career image). The article is conceptual and based on a review of the broader literature on career success, appearance and attractiveness. It explores the evidence for a relationship between attractiveness and career, and the authors propose a conceptual framework in which career image is comprised of three elements (interpersonal skills, aesthetic presentation and beauty). The paper examines a possible role for career professionals in relation to this and then critically examines this role and concludes with the proposition of a research agenda in this area.

This study evaluates the impact of an intervention on business school graduates' employability comprising of a curriculum-based career management skills (CMS) module and an industrial placement year. The study uses data from the destinations of leavers of higher education survey to examine the employability of different groups within the cohort (no intervention, CMS module only and CMS module plus structured work experience). It finds that structured work experience has clear, positive effects on the ability of graduates to secure employment in "graduate level" jobs within six months of graduation. Furthermore, participation in the CMS module also has a clear, positive effect upon the ability of participants to secure employment.

This article examines the Blueprint framework for career management skills as it has been revealed across sequential implementations in the USA, Canada and Australia. It is argued that despite its lack of an empirical basis, the framework forms a useful and innovative means through which career theory, practice and policy can be connected. The framework comprises both core elements (learning areas, learning model and levels) and contextual elements (resources, community of practice, service delivery approach and policy connection). Each of these elements is explored. (Contains 1 table.)