In this symposium we draw on a 2023 global collection where seven international longitudinal studies investigate the relations between young people’s career engagement and subjective wellbeing in their own national systems. While there is danger in international studies, perhaps particularly of career engagement, of over-simplifying policy contexts from around the globe and not attending to national and contextual factors that are inherent in individual education systems (Watts & Sultana, 2004) we temper this by drawing on international literature and evidence-based studies.

We trace the urgent and critical task of ensuring career activities and wellbeing are aligned in both ways and exhort research and practice to extend ways of measuring, understanding and implementing these around the world. The group’s core aims were to:

• improve understanding of the determinants of young people’s career engagement and wellbeing during education-to-work transitions;
• examine the impact of wellbeing and careers interventions on young people’s experience of education, career management and employment outcomes;
• extend our understanding of young people’s education-to-work transitions from an interdisciplinary perspective; and 
• develop a conceptual model and recommendations for careers and wellbeing-oriented prevention and intervention programmes to assist young people as they transition into the world of work.

Across the globe, young people find it increasingly difficult to attain and maintain jobs. Moreover, young people often lack human and social capital and career competencies, and are, therefore, vulnerable to labour market instabilities, such as economic downturns. Lack of employment opportunities allowing young people to build skills and experience progress is a major social problem faced by many industrialised nations over the last few decades, especially in the COVID-19 context. Within such uncertain and ambiguous work context, nurturing young people’s career competencies and wellbeing is crucial for maintaining and sustaining their involvement and resilience in labour markets and to achieve happy, healthy and productive careers.   Wellbeing must not be seen just as ‘surplus value’ but in a modern world focused on decent work there is real importance to go beyond job matching.

There has been previously little research investigating the relation between career engagement and either subjective or objective wellbeing. While a similar collection of international studies has not been found, there is a wealth of data on wellbeing and career activities captured all across the world at a point of compulsory schooling and later in the transition to work (e.g., career aspirations at the age of 15 or longitudinal measurements of life satisfaction). This has meant data was available in longitudinal cohort studies across the world, e.g., Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (Australia), Education Longitudinal Study (USA) and Understanding Society (UK), as well as the International Study of City Youth. Making use of longitudinal data from nationally representative datasets, this collection has aimed to highlight theoretical common grounds for understanding the relevance of career resources for young people’s subjective wellbeing. There were three major similarities across the practice and policy findings of the chapters which we have understood as the following: taking a whole person approach, wide understanding of where and how career support is received by young people and, perhaps most strikingly, multiple opportunities to engage with career guidance and education activities.Overall, the contributions highlight the importance of (i) sensemaking role of time; (ii) resource-based approaches to careers; as well as (iii) acknowledging systematic barriers in the labour market. Having thus illuminated some new understandings about how career engagement is relevant for wellbeing, this symposium aims to consider how young people transition into labour markets and to draw contextualized policy recommendations. 

Watts, A. G., & Sultana, R. G. (2004). Career Guidance Policies in 37 Countries: Contrasts and Common Themes. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 4(2–3), 105–122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10775-005-1025-y