1. MA in Careers Education and Coaching: September 30th 2017
Politics and policy in career and career guidance
September 30th 2017
 7PE565
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2. Learning outcomes By the end of the session you will be able to:
Define politics and policy and discuss the differences between them
Discuss the role that politics and policy play in the careers of individuals
Discuss the role that politics and policy plays in framing career guidance (and career guidance plays in politics and public policy)

3. Note Slides will be available after the session.
A full list of references will be given at the end of the presentation.

4. What do these terms mean?
Regulation
Legislation
Policy
Politics

5. Politics?

6. Politics?

7. Politics?

8. How has politics made a difference to your career?

11. Neoliberalism and common sense
Harvey (2005:2) defines neoliberalism as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.’
He goes onto argue that neoliberalism has been the dominant global ideology since the late 1970s and notes that despite its often destructive consequences it has ‘become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world’ (p.3).

12. Habitus

13. Structuralism

14. Hodkinson, career horizons and careership

15. Career success

16. What are we doing?

17. My definition of career
Career is… the individual’s journey through life, learning and work. It is the place where the individual meets organisations and institutions. It is where individual psychology and aspirations meet social structure. In this sense everyone has a career. Whether they work, get paid, have a string of qualifications and jobs or piles of money or none of these things.

18. The politics of career guidance
Careers education and guidance is a profoundly political process. It operates at the interface between the individual and society, between self and opportunity, between aspiration and realism. It facilitates the allocation of life chances. Within a society in which such life chances are unequally distributed, it faces the issue of whether it serves to reinforce such inequalities or to reduce them. Tony Watts

19. OECD definition
Career guidance refers to services and activities intended to assist individuals, of any age and at any point throughout their lives, to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage their careers…
The activities may take place on an individual or group basis, and may be face-to-face or at a distance (including help lines and web-based services). (OECD, 2004)

20. A new definition?
Hooley, Sultana & Thompson (2017)
Career guidance supports individuals and groups to discover more about work, leisure and learning and to consider their place in the world and plan for their futures. Key to this is developing individual and community capacity to analyse and problematise assumptions and power relations, to network and build solidarity and to create new and shared opportunities. It empowers individuals and groups to struggle within the world as it and to imagine the world as it could be. Career guidance can take a wide range of forms and draws on diverse theoretical traditions. But at its heart it is a purposeful learning opportunity which supports individuals and groups to consider and reconsider work, leisure and learning in the light of new information and experiences and to take both individual and collective action as a result of this.
Both individual and collective perspectives and solution
Critical perspectives on the world and career.

21. So where does politics make a difference to career guidance?

22. Discussion Who benefits from career guidance?
Who pays for career guidance?

23. So why do politicians and policy makers care about career guidance?

24. Public policy rationales
Learning aims
Participation in vocational and higher education.
Reducing early school-leaving.
Enabling learning mobility
Efficient investment in education and training.
Lifelong learning
Labour market aims
Labour market efficiency
Flexibility/flexicurity.
Supporting employment mobility
Youth employment. Active labour markets Effective skills utilisation. Employee engagement.
Social aims
Active ageing
Social equity.
Social inclusion

25. European resolution on integrating guidance (2008)
Rationales for the integration of guidance into lifelong learning strategies
Globalisation
European mobility
Multiple life transitions
Skills mismatches
Social inclusion and equal opportunities

26. Economic benefits

27. Career guidance is both
part of an effectively functioning education and employment system; and
a safeguard against ineffective and imperfect systems.

28. An international policy area
55 national reviews of career guidance systems. Policy and practice exist in many more countries.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s there were a number of large scale cross national studies conducted by OECD, EU, World Bank, ILO etc. which drew out key themes in policy and practice.

29. Key themes
While a small private sector exists in many of these countries – the majority of funding comes from the public sector in all countries where it impacts on a majority of the population.
Career guidance is best organised as a lifelong system, but in most places it mainly exists in silos within the education system.
Responsibility for career guidance is typically spread across a range of ministries. This weakens it as a policy area.

30. Different groups of citizens
User group
Government department
Entitlement to career guidance
Main delivery mechanism
Young people in schools
Young people in college
Young people (NEET)
High education students
Working adults
Unemployed/not working people
Prisoners
Other…?

31. Key elements of current policy
National Careers Service
The Careers & Enterprise Company
Jobcentre Plus
Statutory guidance for schools
Local authority targeted provision
Consumer expectations on FE and HE

32. Wider UK policy links Brexit ‘Just about managing’ (JAM) T-levels
Higher education reform
Industrial strategy

34. What difference does all of this make to your practice?

35. Socio-political ideologies of guidance
Radical (social change)
Progressive (individual change)
Conservative (social control)
Liberal (non-directive)

36. References
Council of the European Union. (2008). Council Resolution on Better Integrating Lifelong Guidance into Lifelong Learning Strategies. Brussels: Council of the European Union
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hodkinson, P. (2008). Understanding Career Decision-Making and Progression: Careership Revised. John Killeen Memorial Lecture, Woburn House, London 16th October 2008.
Hooley, T. (2017). Fog in the Channel – Continent Cut Off: The Implications of Brexit for Career Guidance in the UK. Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling, 38,
Hooley, T. and Barham, L. (Eds.). (2015). Career Development Policy and Practice: The Tony Watts Reader. Stafford: Highflyers.
Hooley, T. and Dodd, V. (2015). The Economic Benefits of Career Guidance. Careers England.
Hooley, T., Sultana, R.G. and Thomsen, R. (2017). The neoliberal challenge to career guidance - mobilising research, policy and practice around social justice. In Hooley, T., Sultana, R.G. and Thomsen, R. (Eds.) Career guidance for social justice: Contesting neoliberalism. London: Routledge.
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2004). Career Guidance and Public Policy: Bridging the Gap. Paris: OECD.
Roberts, K. (1977). The social conditions, consequences and limitations of career guidance’, British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 5, 1-9.
Watts, A.G. (2014). Cross-national reviews of career guidance systems: overview and reflections. Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling, 32, 4-14.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House.

37. Contact details Tristram Hooley
Director of Research, The Careers & Enterprise Company
Professor of Career Education, University of Derby
Also at
@pigironjoe