Public policy is crucial to careers guidance work in terms of its funding, development and strategic direction.

This section aims to:

• Provide an overview of policy and priorities
• Examine the relationship between guidance and policy
• Signpost implications of policy for guidance

Public policy is not of immediate and intrinsic interest to most career guidance practitioners. What draws them to their work, and inspires and motivates them, are not policy goals, but a concern for helping people. They tend to be interested in people as individuals, not in political agendas.

But public policy is crucial to career guidance work. Most career guidance services in most countries are paid for by governments, whether at national, regional or local level. A few countries have experimented with the possibility of moving at least in part towards more market-based models in which individuals (especially adults) pay, but even this is a policy decision. Moves to tilt policy in particular directions – towards market forces or towards combating social exclusion, to take just two examples – can have a massive influence on the organisational contexts in which career guidance is carried out, on the individuals to whom it is addressed, and on the forms it takes.