The Careers Adviser Workforce 2024

A report for the Gatsby Charitable Foundation

The Gatsby Foundation (Gatsby) is a charitable foundation that was set up in 1967. It provides funding, commissions research, and supports interventions across six key areas. One of these key areas is education, with a focus on good career guidance, especially in secondary schools and colleges. Gatsby recognises the need for young people to have high-quality career guidance to make informed decisions about their future, and the importance of good career guidance in achieving social justice. In 2013 Gatsby commissioned Sir John Holman to research actions to improve career guidance in England which led to the development of the Good Career Guidance Benchmarks (Holman, 2014) which were adopted from 2018 as part of the Government’s Careers Strategy for schools and colleges to guide provision in schools and colleges. To support implementation of the benchmarks requires an appropriate infrastructure including a strong workforce of professional careers advisers.

This current report provides an update and added insights to the IES report commissioned and published in 2021 ‘The professional careers adviser workforce’. It provides details of the size and profile of the careers adviser workforce currently working in England, with a focus on the settings they work in and how this has changed over time. This will help Gatsby to understand the challenges in ensuring all young people have access to high quality personal guidance (Gatsby Benchmark 8) but also the issues in providing career guidance for adults as Gatsby interest broadens to include adults.

This report follows the method tested and adopted in the earlier study and draws on national data sources that proved most useful:

■   The Census of Population (2021), updating the analysis in the previous report that used the 2011 Census data, to explore the demographic characteristics and employment situation of careers advisers.

■   Ofqual qualifications data, to investigate the number of career guidance and advice qualifications obtained.

■   The Labour Force Survey (LFS), drawing on the spring quarter datasets to allow for analysis of movement of careers advisers into and out of employment and between occupations and sectors from one year to the next.