Policy Reflections on Young People’s Career Development and Wellbeing: An Enquiry Across National Education Systems Based on Longitudinal Data

In this chapter we analyze and contextualize the findings of the authors from the education systems within the global stage. We then underscore the limits of this research which originate primarily from the nature of the exercise using longitudinal data, not the authors’ contributions. There is danger in international studies, perhaps particularly of career guidance, of oversimplifying policy contexts from around the globe, and not attending to national and contextual factors that are inherent in individual education systems (Watts and Sultana, Int J Educ Vocat Guid 4(2–3): 105–122, 2004). We trace the urgent and critical task of aligning career resources and wellbeing both ways and exhort research and practice to extend ways of measuring, understanding, and implementing these around the world. There has been previously little research investigating the relation between career resources and either subjective or objective measures of wellbeing. While a similar collection of international studies has not been found, there is a wealth of data on wellbeing and career development 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).