Green guidance open letter: Questioning the compass that guides our practice

Pronounced by André Chauvet at the launch event of the Open letter : For career practices that integrate sustainability.

On behalf of the Green Guidance Lab , I am both delighted and grateful to everyone, and also a little “proud” to open this webinar. This moment is not only an opportunity for us to express our observations, concerns, and proposals. We know that open letters are numerous and can easily get lost in the deafening noise of the world’s anger. We sincerely believe that the future is not yet written, and that in these times of predation and destructive selfishness, doors and projects can be opened to maintain a habitable and just world.

Naiveté? Utopia? “To live is not to resign oneself,” said Albert Camus. We are not resigned. And we fully intend to persevere. But to do so, we need to broaden our perspective, speak out more loudly and to more people, get out of our offices, find allies, and advocates. And engage with those who shape public policy. Because careers education, information, advice, and guidance are inherently political issues.

This open letter, which is also an appeal, is structured around three questions: Why ? Why else ? How to move forward?

Why: some observations first

Coming out of a terrible summer where everyone could feel the impacts of climate change, ecological issues weigh more heavily than ever on the habitability of the world and are profoundly transforming professional lives.

As early as 1996, Peter Plant, whom we are so delighted to welcome, laid the foundations of Green Guidance. He called on career guidance professionals to move beyond a strictly individualistic view of career paths and integrate environmental, social, and collective issues into career choices. Guidance can no longer be limited to “optimizing” individual employability.

However, despite numerous remarkable academic works and initiatives all over the world, actions remain limited, often carried out by isolated professionals or by small, committed groups with little influence. And public policies primarily address career guidance from the perspective of greening jobs and skills, within a paradigm of adapting to the world as it is. As if the current world and the one to come were not the result of specific decisions.

As if the rules of employability were inevitable. And in this adaptive paradigm, social justice has little place. And while many professionals feel that practices cannot continue as they are, they struggle to state this openly. And to translate this into their daily practice.

The arguments for maintaining the status quo are now well rehearsed: no integration into official guidelines, possible breach of neutrality, questions about the legitimacy of the professional and their practices (how to do it in practice?), risk of additional pressure on people who already have great difficulty finding decent work. he risk is that alternative practices become marginalized, dismissed as mere personal conviction.

For what other world? A new paradigm: environmentally sustainable careers

If we want to move beyond greenwashing, we need to collectively re-examine our conceptions of future careers. These sustainable working lives could be part of a transformative paradigm.

First, they unfold within institutional frameworks that cannot remain unchanged: the world of work is the result of an economic and social system that amplifies ecological and social impacts. It is also about recovering the thread of an emancipatory professional tradition, one gradually diluted by skills frameworks and employability requirements. Because career guidance also raises questions about work, growth, and social justice.

And it is not just about helping people integrate into the world as it is. Because guidance extends into a triple dimension: ecological, social and democratic.

Integrating these three dimensions already partially addresses the question of neutrality. If the responsibility of professionals is to enable individuals to make informed choices, then incorporating the environmental and social impact of work into career guidance practices is no longer optional, but a responsibility : everyone has the right to know the real ecological and social impact of the work they do or are offered.

This does not in any way affect freedom of choice but highlights a criterion that can no longer be ignored: the impacts of work on the habitability of the world.

And we need to make visible the professions of high ecological and social value (energy renovation, care, sustainable agriculture, repair) so that they become normal, desirable prospects, accessible to all, not just the most privileged.

Open new ways forward

“To act… means to take an initiative, to begin,” said Hannah Arendt. There are already numerous initiatives and of high quality; it is our impact that is in question today.

How can we move from an adaptive approach to emancipatory logics, while being aware of the paradoxes at play?

We also know that, for many people, the primary challenge remains access to decent work. How, then, can we avoid adding further pressure and guilt? How can we avoid reducing sustainability issues to only those already privileged? How can we demonstrate that environmental impacts cannot be addressed without attention to social justice?

To begin our discussion, we can re-examine the compass that still guides professional lives. It values self-fulfillment, freedom, and the power to act. As if all of life should consist of forcing one’s way through reality to carve out a place for oneself, indifferent to the impact on the common good.

The current moment calls for greater humility. Our illusion of omnipotence has led us to the worst acts of destruction and plunder.

What if our resources lay instead in recognizing our interdependencies and vulnerabilities? Our action cannot be reduced to mastering the world; it depends on the attention we pay to common goods, which are so fragile and threatened.

Choosing a career path is also choosing a world.

This challenge is not just for career guidance professionals . It concerns elected officials who vote on employment and training policies, trainers who develop standards, trade unionists, parents, and each of us as citizens.

Repoliticizing career guidance means refusing to let the market alone decide the value of work and the world it helps to create. It means finally opening up a public debate commensurate with what is at stake.