This article aims to explore perceptions of learning outcomes, central professional competence, and the profession among students graduating from the higher education programme in career guidance and counselling in Sweden. The empirical data consists of semi-structured interviews with 22 students graduating in career guidance and counselling. The students consider individual career guidance counselling to constitute the heartland of the professional practice and emphasise practical competence, or know-how, learned in courses in conversation methodology and workplace learning. They find that the substance, or know-what, of career guidance counselling, such as knowledge of education systems and the labour market, needs to be learned in professional practice as it is specific to the organisation and workplace. They argue that their profession has a low status in society and that career guidance counsellors are expected to display professionalism and establish a basis for trust and legitimacy in the workplace.

This paper presents a framework for understanding epistemic injustice in career development theory and practice. It is based on Fricker's philosophical conceptualisation of epistemic injustice and its sub-forms of hermeneutical and testimonial injustice. The intention is to generate insights that direct us to injustices embedded in knowledge production and institutional practices that harm a person's capacity as a knower. Moreover, the intellectual-ethical virtue of mitigating epistemic injustice and how this virtue can be enacted in the context of career guidance are discussed. I argue that epistemic justice approaches contribute to intellectual and ethical dimensions of social justice and there is a need to examine distinct forms of injustices of knowing manifested in the knowledge of career development and career guidance practice.

This article investigates the professional integration of a group of newly arrived teachers, mainly from Syria, who participated in the labour market Fast-track programme in Sweden, which aims at facilitating quicker pathways to teaching positions. Drawing on the institutional perspective, our analysis focuses on formal and informal institutional conditions that hinder or enable newly arrived teachers in their striving for legitimacy as professional teachers. Analysis of focus group interviews and observations show that despite their professional experiences there are limits to their prior professional skills and competences being recognized within the Swedish school. The main institutional challenges identified were acquiring Swedish, understanding and managing the pupil-centred curriculum and its associated communication skills and taking on the facilitator teacher role. Handling and negotiating these challenges are important for gaining recognition as professional teachers, which, it seems, influences their opportunities for employment. To afford them opportunities for professional socialization, it is important to enable them to become acquainted with, handle and negotiate institutional conditions within a new school culture. In contrast to the quick-fix view of European integration policy, our study shows that the professional integration process takes time and includes a socialization process.

Bakgrunden till denna studie är ett regeringsbeslut att införa en rad Snabbspår för nyanlända med yrkeserfarenhet inom vissa bristyrken. I studien undersöks den professionaliseringsprocess som en grupp nyanlända lärare går igenom under tiden i Snabbspåret för nyanlända lärare och förskollärare. Studien omfattar fokusgruppintervjuer med deltagare i Stockholm under våren 2017, lärare som undervisar i Snabbspåret och handledare på den arbetsplatsförlagda praktiken. Dessutom gjordes en enkätundersökning med deltagarna samt observationer av den arbetsplatsförlagda praktiken och av undervisningen i Snabbspåret. Studien visar att gruppen nyanlända lärare fick kunskap om den svenska skolan på flera plan. Men framför allt tycks Snabbspåret ha erbjudit dem ett första steg i processen att återgå till läraryrket i ett nytt land. Samtidigt framgår det att de nyanlända lärarna står inför flera utmaningar när de söker etablera sig som lärare i Sverige. Dessa utmaningar går dels att relatera till formella institutionella villkor, som att erhålla en lärarlegitimation och krav på kunskaper i svenska, dels till informella villkor som baseras på normer och värderingar om lärare och vad som anses utgöra lärarprofessionalism i Sverige. I studien framkommer att den process de nyanlända lärarna genomgår i mycket handlar om ett samspel mellan de reglerande strukturer de möter under tiden i Snabbspåret och deras eget förhållningssätt och agerande i detta möte.

This chapter explores the possibility of social justice to emerge within career guidance by drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘intellectual equality’, which rests upon the assumption that everyone is able to speak and understand. It means that equality is a practice that is manifested and affirmed in emancipatory acts, and it has pedagogical implications for career guidance. Experimenting with this line of thought, I offer a modest suggestion by introducing an attentive career guidance understood as getting out of position and opening up a possible modification of the social order with respect to the emancipator and the emancipated. Based on philosophical reasoning, attentive career guidance does not aim to generate instructions, guidelines or models; however, it addresses pedagogical relations. Primarily, it is an invitation to think differently about emancipation, equality and social justice in career guidance and reflect upon what matters in public career guidance.

The overall aim of this thesis is to enquire into and problematize the governance of career guidance and how individuals’ career management is constructed within EU policy. The empirical material consists of European policy documents produced during 2000-2015. The two central research questions explore (1) how European career guidance is made governable, and (2) how individuals’ career management is constructed and governed. The Foucauldian governmentality perspective and the analytic method of problematization is utilized. The analysis focuses on the compositions of normative forms of reason, discursive practices and techniques by which governing is exercised and knowledge is produced. The thesis is based on four articles, three of which concern career guidance and career management. The fourth article concerns education of citizenship. The analysis shows that the formation of a policy space for comparison of national systems of career guidance is significant for making European career guidance amenable to governance. It is mobilized by governing practices for involvement of institutional actors and the construction of standards of performance. This form of governance becomes effective on the condition that institutional actors use and produce knowledge and practices about what works in career guidance, and this implies self-control and constant monitoring. It is a complex process of producing self-regulation of career guidance adjustable to change and innovation in which both standardization and modulation are inbuilt. Moreover, this is dependent on the interplay of governance and self-government. Knowledge and practices shape career management as an individual competence, which each individual is assumed to achieve. The use of guidance techniques supporting this design and self-regulating practices contributes to responsibilizing individuals to achieve this competence. Knowledge of individuals’ management of their careers includes civic competence. This led me to extend my use of the theoretical framework to investigate how knowledge of civic competence is constructed in European policy documents concerning teacher education from 2000 to 2012. My analysis shows that presumptions of teaching civic competence support the production of the active and learning subject.

In recent years, the idea of the contribution of education to citizenship has been reinitiated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate constructions of citizenship as they are articulated in European policy documents on teacher education. It is indicated that the normative form of active citizenship is put into play through the individual and her or his actions, which is centred on learning. Drawing on Foucault’s analytic approach to problematization and Foucauldian methods of analysing policy problematizations of a certain problem, this study draws attention to the discourse of active citizenship and technologies of accountability that are utilized to shape teaching civic learning. It is suggested that citizenship is constructed as a learning problem, which motivates young people in school to reflect on their skills and competences. It is also from these capacities that their attitudes towards cultural diversity are assumed to be developed. Thus, in the formation of citizenship, emphasis is laid on the individual’s capacity for learning, which is also mobilized in narratives of the construction of Europe.

Current political strategy to reform career guidance systems in Europe is regulated by subtle practices. Using the governmentality perspective, the purpose of this article is to make sense, in theoretical terms, of governmental reason and mechanisms in reshaping of career guidance systems. The investigation draws attention to mechanisms and practices such as monitoring and evaluation which indirectly operate in the policy process to make career guidance systems amenable for management. Drawing empirically on European policy texts, the analysis focuses on policy use of “good practice” and provision of data, which work upon the attitude to performance improvement and self-improvement. This article seeks to elucidate that incentive for learning from “good practice” and evaluation is related to the present form of governance by indirect mechanisms, and that this kind of governance enables constant reconstruction of career guidance.