Ensuring quality in career guidance: a critical review

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Career guidance
• quality
• quality assurance
• policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tristram Hooley is Professor in Careers Education at the University of Derby, UK; Professor at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway; and Director of Research at the Careers and Enterprise Company, UK. He researches and writes about career and career development. He has particular interests in career education and guidance in schools, careers policy and the role of new technologies in careers, education and research. He also writes the Adventures in Career Development blog at adventuresincareerdevelopment.wordpress.com.

Suzanne Rice is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy within the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests focus on student engagement and retention, and in particular, the role of careers education in student engagement and retention, as well as teacher attraction and retention. She has published widely, including in Teachers and Teaching, Educational Review and Journal of Education Policy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Melbourne Graduate School of Education [grant number Seed funding grant].