Bengaluru,Dec.09,2025: “Career Guidance as a Human Right” is not just a slogan — it’s a vision that recognizes the fundamental importance of informed career planning in shaping individuals’ lives and societies at large. In a world changed by rapid technological shifts, evolving job markets, and widening social inequalities, giving everyone access to high-quality career guidance is not optional — it’s essential.
Career guidance empowers individuals to understand themselves, their strengths, their values, and align them with opportunities that lead to sustained personal and professional growth. When accessible to all — regardless of background — it can help bridge the gap between potential and opportunity, turning aspirations into meaningful careers and reducing inequality in the process.
What Is Career Guidance — And Who Benefits
Definition and Goals
Career guidance refers to structured advice, counselling, and support provided to individuals to help them make informed decisions about their education, training, and career paths. According to international frameworks, its purpose is to help people: understand their strengths and interests, realistically examine labour market opportunities, adapt to changing work environments, and make decisions that reflect both personal aspirations and market demand.
Career guidance helps individuals
- develop self-awareness about abilities, weaknesses, interests, and values;
- explore a wide range of career options — not just traditional or familiar ones — including emerging fields;
- plan realistic and achievable education/career pathways, including internships, skill development, and job search strategies;
- build confidence, reduce anxiety around career decisions, and stay motivated;
- Who Needs It
- Students and young people, at the point of choosing streams, courses or higher education, when decisions can have lifelong impact.
- Early-career individuals or fresh graduates, needing guidance to align their education with market realities, prepare for job applications, and understand evolving trends.
- Adults undergoing career changes or upskilling, especially in a world where automation, globalization and sectoral shifts are common.
- Marginalized or disadvantaged groups — people from low socio-economic backgrounds, underrepresented communities, or rural areas, who often lack access to reliable career information and mentoring.
- In this way, career guidance isn’t a luxury — it’s a foundational support system that everyone should have access to, at different stages of life.
Inequality, Social Mobility and Career Guidance
The Inequality Challenge
Across the world, individuals from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds face disproportionate barriers when transitioning from education to work. Even if they have equivalent qualifications, lack of social and cultural capital — like access to networks, role models, or labour-market insight — often prevents them from converting potential into opportunity.
Research from OECD (2024) confirms that students from disadvantaged backgrounds engage less in career development activities than their peers, leading to social inequality and limited upward mobility.
Meanwhile, for many countries — including India — the availability of trained career counsellors is far below what is considered standard globally. For instance, a widely cited estimate suggests that India would need over 1.4 million counsellors to meet global norms, yet the actual ratio remains far lower, leaving most students without structured guidance.
How Career Guidance Can Mitigate Inequality
Implementing equitable career guidance systems — especially in schools and community centres — can significantly level the playing field
- Personalized support helps students from all backgrounds understand the full range of career options, even those they might never have considered due to social or economic barriers. This includes exposure to non-traditional or emerging fields, breaking stereotypes around “elite jobs.”
- Bridging knowledge gaps: Providing up-to-date, accurate labour-market information, required qualifications, skill demands — essential for making sound career decisions, especially for those lacking access to informal networks.
- Building social and cultural capital: Through mentoring, internships, exposure visits, job fairs, and employer engagement — which are especially effective when public employment services or schools partner with employers and community groups.
- Encouraging lifelong adaptability: As the job market evolves rapidly, career guidance equips individuals to reskill or pivot — preventing skill mismatches and unemployment traps.
By embedding career guidance into public policy and education systems — and ensuring it reaches underserved communities — societies can take a concrete step toward equal opportunity and social mobility.
Career Guidance Over the Lifespan
While guidance early in life is crucial, the reality of the modern world demands support across one’s working life.
For Adults and Career Changers
According to OECD data, many adults seek career advice later in life — for job changes, upskilling or adapting to shifting labour markets.
But ironically, those who might need it most — lower-educated adults, people in high-automation risk occupations, or rural workers — are least likely to access guidance.
Ensuring career guidance as a human right means making services accessible across age groups: supporting mid-career transitions, retraining efforts, or navigating uncertain job markets.
For Organizations and the Economy
Quality career guidance doesn’t just serve individuals — it strengthens institutions and economies. Businesses benefit from employees whose skills and aspirations are aligned with their roles; societies benefit from a workforce that is adaptable, motivated, and engaged.
Providing lifelong career guidance promotes continuous learning and flexibility — essential traits in an era of automation, globalization, and fast-changing demands.
Economic Growth, Inclusion and Purpose
Recognizing career guidance as a human right isn’t just beneficial for individuals — it carries wide societal benefits.
1. Reducing Skill Mismatch and Boosting Employment
By aligning individuals’ interests, strengths, and training with actual labour-market demands, career guidance reduces skill mismatches, lowers unemployment/underemployment, and ensures a more efficient labour supply.
This not only improves job prospects for individuals but also helps economies meet labour demand, increase productivity, and foster sustainable growth.
2. Promoting Social Equity and Mobility
When career guidance is accessible across socio-economic, gender, and geographic divides, it becomes a tool for social justice. It ensures that people from disadvantaged backgrounds have equal access to information, opportunities, mentorship and pathways — helping them rise based on merit rather than privilege.
3. Encouraging Purpose, Well-being and Stability
Beyond financial outcomes, guided career decisions can lead to greater job satisfaction, personal fulfillment, and a sense of purpose. People who work in fields aligned with their values and strengths tend to be more engaged, motivated, and mentally healthier.
This not only benefits individuals — but also helps build more stable, cohesive and hopeful societies.
How to Make Career Guidance a Right
Turning “Career Guidance as a Human Right” from ideal into reality requires coordinated action across stakeholders: governments, educational institutions, employers, and communities. Here’s a roadmap:
Embed Career Guidance in School Curricula
- Introduce structured career education and counselling as a core part of school curricula starting from secondary school (or even before).
- Ensure sufficient number of trained career counsellors per school — globally accepted ratios (e.g. counsellor to student) should guide policy
- Provide equal access across rural and urban schools, ensuring marginalized communities are included.
Invest in Continuous, Lifelong Guidance
- Extend guidance services beyond school — offer them at community centres, public employment services, and adult education platforms.
- Develop systems that allow for reskilling and career transitions, especially in sectors facing disruption or automation.
Engage Employers, Industry and Social Partners
- Encourage collaboration between schools/colleges and employers to offer internships, job-shadowing, industry talks and mentoring. This helps bridge the gap between theoretical education and real-world demands
- Maintain updated labour-market information so counselling is grounded in current and future demands — not outdated assumptions.
Prioritize Equity and Inclusion
- Pro-actively target underrepresented/marginalized groups — low-income, rural, gender minorities, migrants — to ensure they receive guidance and support.
- Design customised, culturally-sensitive guidance programmes.
Ensure Quality, Professionalism and Accountability
- Train counsellors not just in traditional career advice but also in labour-market intelligence, cultural mediation, psychological assessment, and lifelong learning strategies.
- Monitor and evaluate guidance programmes to ensure they deliver real value — increased employability, better career outcomes, social mobility.
Unlocking Futures Begins with Access
Recognizing Career Guidance as a Human Right is not just a moral imperative — it is a practical necessity in today’s rapidly changing world. It gives individuals clarity, purpose, and a fair shot at success — regardless of background. It strengthens societies by promoting equity, mobility, and economic resilience.
When career guidance is available to all — from students in remote villages to adults seeking career pivots — we unlock the immense, often untapped human potential. We pave the way for more inclusive growth, meaningful work, and real opportunity.
Prof Suvasish Mukhopadhyay
Contact no. : +91 98232 93641
Mail Id : professor_sm@rediffmail.com
