The Future of Career Guidance

Artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically large language models (LLMs), has the potential to radically change how career guidance could be accessed. Since it is not possible to know exactly how this might occur, this report describes where things are now, and imagines five future scenarios that might develop over the coming decade. The aim is to help the career guidance profession think through the potential impact and prepare for an uncertain future.

The report explores how AI-powered platforms could extend reach and offer more personalised and up-to-date advice to create a more inclusive and effective all-age careers support system.

Research from Demos suggests 9.7m people in the UK lack access to essential career guidance. In schools, the current ratio of students to suitably qualified careers advisers makes it impossible to provide a meaningful experience to every young person who needs it, which sees many left behind. More than one in 10 haven’t had an interview with a qualified adviser by the end of Year 11 and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, in particular, engage less consistently in career development.

Far from replacing Careers Development Professionals (CDPs), the report argues for a human-centred, AI-enhanced approach, with the use of AI increasing the productivity of existing advisers and freeing them up to focus on those individuals who need more specialist support. An average productivity gain of 14% was found in an analysis of empowering customer service support staff with generative AI based tools. The report suggests the careers sector should be equally ambitious in accelerating careers provision.

The report proposes a range of ways in which near-term AI technologies could be deployed to support people in their next steps, from providing high level information on what different careers are like to finding adjacent roles/sectors to a role someone is interested in, analysing job adverts and company websites to better understand trends and providing information on application success rates.

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