Today, career guidance is not merely linked to matching demand and supply at the labour market or to support the individual in their path to job and education. The added value of career guidance has increasingly come to be about supporting career development through enabling the individual to learn to create one’s career and capitalising oneself in social life (e.g. Bengtsson, 2011). Creativity and entrepreneurial behaviour are pinpointed as high valued career management skills (henceforth CMS) in the knowledge economy and career guidance shall encourage the individual to learn these skills (Council of the European Union, 2008). They are not the only CMS promoted, but these skills will be in focus in this paper. The aim of this paper is to map how creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation are constructed in relationship to career (self)management in a number of recent European policy documents on career guidance (Cedefop, 2011a,b; ELPGN, 2012). The research questions are: What consequences have this representation of CMS for career guidance? What forms of governing practices are deployed to encourage creativity and entrepreneurship as specific CMS?

Like policy of education and training in the 2000’s, European policy of career guidance is linked to what is known the knowledge economy and the creative economy. In these kinds of economies, the concept of innovation and creativity is knowledge-based and regarded as values for economic growth. Pooling knowledge outside the work organisations and education institutions is crucial to innovation and creativity (Araya & Peters, 2010). The ’career turn’ in organisation theory is linked up with this approach to cognitive values. In the boundary-less organisation the ’career’ is moving from the organisation to the self-developing person who contributes to the organisation. The personalised 'career' is a repository of knowledge (Arthur, 1994). There is an assumption that adaptation of the entrepreneurial mindset will unlock tacit knowledge which benefits innovation (Polanyi, 1958/1998).

My approach to policy is that it is process where there is a struggle over knowledge. Policy is more than policy text; it constitutes discourses and produce social effects (Taylor et al, 1997). The analysis is directed to truth-claims of entrepreneurship in relation to ‘career’ and the interaction of discursive and technical practices in governing the individual to achieve desirable CMS. The analytic position to human capital takes its standpoint from Michel Foucault’s analysis of liberal biopolitics based upon the idea that management of the population is to be governed through the individual.  The theoretical framework is inspired Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which very brief is about the interrelationship of governing of others and self-government (Foucault, 2008, 2009). The governmentality perspective allows de-familiarising the technical practices which are taken in use to conduct the individual to achieve creative and entrepreneurial skills. In addition, it helps to derive the formulation and structuring of the problem of creating human capital.

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