What impact should policy have on career guidance practice?

It is important that policy-makers are clear about what they expect from career guidance services. Some policy goals anticipate that the services will foster specified outcomes from individuals’ career decision-making: for example, enhanced participation in formal learning. A key issue is whether policy-makers expect career guidance practitioners to pursue such outcomes directly in their dealings with an individual client; or whether they are willing to support practitioners in addressing the individual’s interests, in the confidence that, when aggregated, this will meet the public objectives too.

The primacy of the individual’s interests is commonly a core principle in codes of practice for career guidance services. There are practical as well as ethical reasons for this, not least that such services can only serve the public good if they retain the confidence and trust of the individuals they serve.

This implies a self-denying ordinance on the part of policy-makers, who may justify public support for the services on the grounds that they serve public purposes, but who have to abnegate these purposes as the operating principles on which the practice of the services should be based. It is, in principle, a classic case of Adam Smith’s famous dictum that individuals encouraged to pursue their own interests are led by an ‘invisible hand’ to promote an end that is no part of their intention – the public interest – and to do so more effectually than when they intend to promote it (Smith, 1776). In this sense, career guidance services could represent Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ made flesh. Their role is to not to determine what individuals should do, but to ensure that their decisions are well-informed (in terms of, among other things, the needs of the labour market) and well-thought-through. If there could be a clear understanding between policy-makers and practitioners on this issue, it would greatly enhance communication and collaboration between the two (Watts, 2000; see also Hiebert & Bezanson, 2000; Bezanson & O’Reilly, 2002).

What evidence is needed by policy makers to monitor impact of their policies?

As noted above, the evidence base required for effective policy-making needs to include not only evidence on inputs and processes, but also on outputs and outcomes. In these terms, client reaction data is easiest to collect. Policy-makers may also, however, require more demanding evidence of impact.

What strategies can be developed for collecting impact evidence?

The potential impact of career guidance can be thought of in relation to potential benefits at the individual, organisational and societal levels:

• At the individual level, benefits could result from people being better able to manage their choices of learning and work, and to maximise their potential.
• At the organisational level, benefits could flow to education and training providers if learners were assisted to identify and enter learning programmes which meet their needs and aspirations; they could flow to employers if career guidance resulted in a supply of job applicants whose talents and motivations were matched to employers’ requirements.
• At the societal level, benefits could emerge if career guidance led to greater efficiency in the allocation of human resources: for example by enhancing the motivation of learners and workers; reducing drop-outs from education and training; reducing mismatches between labour supply and demand; encouraging upskilling of the workforce; reducing the incidence of floundering between job transitions; and thus improving the ways that learning and labour markets operate. Social benefits could also result if career guidance helped to widen access to learning and work opportunities (both helping people to avoid social exclusion and helping the excluded to gain access to learning and work), thus enhancing social equity (OECD, 2004).

As indicated above, these potential effects can be thought of as operating at three stages: immediate learning outcomes, such as attitudinal changes and increased knowledge; intermediate behavioural outcomes: for example, improved search efficiency and persistence, or entering a particular career path, course or job as a result of career guidance; and long-term outcomes such as success and satisfaction.

What evidence is currently available on impact evaluation?

Most of the existing evaluation evidence relates to learning outcomes. There are two main reasons for this:

• It is appropriate. Learning outcomes directly represent the aims of career guidance interventions. Most such interventions are concerned not to prescribe what individuals should do but to help them acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes which will help them to make more considered and better informed career choices and transitions.
• It is practicable. Since learning outcomes are immediate, they are relatively easy and cheap to measure; studies of longer-term outcomes are more complex and expensive to mount, and more subject to contamination from extraneous factors.

Strong evidence of positive impact in terms of learning outcomes include a review by Killeen & Kidd (1991) of 40 (mainly US) studies, and more extensive and rigorous US meta-analyses of good-quality controlled studies by Spokane & Oliver (1983), by Oliver & Spokane (1988) and by Whiston, Sexton & Lasoff (1998).

Studies of behavioural outcomes and of long-term outcomes require a follow-up design, which raises a number of methodological difficulties. Nonetheless, a number of studies have demonstrated that guidance interventions result in behavioural outcomes of particular kinds: for example, participation in learning programmes or entry of unemployed people into unsubsidised employment (see OECD, 2004).

In general, the evidence on the benefits of guidance is limited but positive. If more definitive long-term evidence is required by policy-makers, the studies to establish such evidence need to be mounted. In particular, if some longitudinal studies could be set up to explore the relationship between immediate learning outcomes and longer-term outcomes, and if positive connections between them could be established, the learning outcomes could thereafter be regarded not only as being of value in their own right but also as proxies for the longer-term outcomes (Killeen, White & Watts, 1992). To date, no such studies have been conducted.