Open letter for career practices that integrate sustainability: notes from the launch event
On 29 September 2026 we organized the launch of the open letter “For career practices that integrate sustainability“. The letter was initiated by the Lab Green Guidance and the community around Exploring Green Guidance, and it has since been signed by researchers internationally. The session moderated by Eva Kavková, opened with Peter Plant, who introduced the idea of green guidance, and with André Chauvet, one of the letter’s authors, who presented its argument. A round table followed with Anne Chant, Chair of the NICE Foundation, Romain Boitard, Advisor on Greening at the European Training Foundation, and Valérie Cohen-Scali, UNESCO Chair of Lifelong Guidance and Counseling. Eva Kavková moderated. What follows is a selection of what was said, organised by theme rather than by speaker.
Peter Plant: Guidance has never been neutral
Peter Plant opened the debate by asking whether the profession had ever been neutral at all. “Even if you think you’re impartial or neutral, you’re always part of something else, you’re part of somebody’s policies, you’re part of the society in which you are, the times in which you live.” André Chauvet took the same line from the letter’s side: “careers education, information, advice, and guidance are inherently political issues.” He argued that the question of neutrality is partly settled by the profession’s own purpose. If practitioners exist to enable informed choices, then “everyone has the right to know the real ecological and social impact of the work they do or are offered.” He added that this “does not in any way affect freedom of choice“.
Romain Boitard, who stressed that he is not a career adviser and works between climate policy and labour market analysis, rejected the premise of the question. “No, it’s not political. It’s rational.” He asked practitioners to open the latest IPCC report and consider the situation the world is in, and he described the real choice as one between denying, delaying or acting in the face of evidence. Anne Chant made the same point from practice: “It’s not a political issue, it’s about survival for the young people that we’re talking about. That’s not political, that’s just facts.” She added that schools and institutions should establish these facts beforehand, so that raising sustainability in a guidance conversation is not a surprise. It “has to be normalised“, she said, like asking whether someone prefers to work inside or outside. She also kept client-centredness intact: “We have to hold up a mirror to what is being said and don’t judge because it’s their life, they can make their choices.”
Valérie Cohen-Scali argued that the objection rests on a lack of information. “If practitioners have a training, have information about the situation, they will not ask us this question. They will know that there is no choice. They have to change their practices.” In her view the letter also makes visible something the profession had not acknowledged: that guidance “brings to light the political dimension of career counseling and guidance, which has never truly been recognized, but is clearly, we see, central.“
Avoiding the moralistic approach to green guidance
The letter does not ignore the objection that sustainability can become one more burden on people with the least room to manoeuvre. André Chauvet put it as a set of open questions: “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?“
Romain Boitard answered from the labour market evidence. “People do not choose a career on a level playing field“, he said, and family income, geography, gender, qualifications and family responsibilities all constrain what is possible. “The idea is not to have a moralizing approach and tell people you can choose better.” For the most disadvantaged, he recommended to “be realistic and non-moralizing, and look at actual opportunities that are available within their vicinity“. Eva Kavková summarised the practical side: people cannot be blamed or pushed into something uncomfortable, and “it’s really important that they have some choice and some stable income and then maybe they can move on“. She also recalled a conclusion from the NICE conference in Athens: “you should never push the individual, you should push the system.“
Anne Chant added a warning about who is in the room. Among those working on these questions, she said, there is too little diversity, and the needs of “people who don’t have the privilege to ask these questions because they haven’t the time to address them” have to be considered. “They’re just trying to survive.” She called for engagement with the global majority, noting that the Western world caused much of the problem.
Little place for social justice within the adaptative paradigm of guidance
The link to social justice ran through the whole session. Eva Kavková gave it as a conclusion of the Athens conference: there are “no green jobs or green guidance without social justice“. André Chauvet described the current policy approach, which treats career guidance as a matter of greening jobs and skills and adapting to the world as it is, and noted that “in this adaptive paradigm, social justice has little place.” He closed his presentation with a political claim: “Repoliticizing career guidance means refusing to let the market alone decide the value of work and the world it helps to create.“
Anne Chant was the most direct about what the profession currently does. Working with practitioners in a deprived part of east London, she said, she sees them anxious to learn where the skills gaps are: “Our job really then is to tell young people where they’re going to get a job, where the neoliberal world that we’re servicing needs those people to go.” Green jobs, she argued, often repeat the pattern, since they answer a demand for engineers and makers but do not go far enough “in looking at the big picture of human and societal and planetary flourishing“. In her closing remarks she recalled that career guidance began as a way of making sure children had jobs to go to when they left school. “The whole rationale for the existence of career guidance and career counselling has got to change, because we are not in the same world as we were, and we have many other social justice issues to address, and careers work is the way to do that.“
The “hype“ of the green jobs
Romain Boitard devoted much of his intervention to what labour market data say about green jobs. “We’ve seen at labor market analysis level this hype about green jobs that has been going on for over a decade now.” After ten years, he said, the statistics confirm that classical green jobs are growing, “however, it’s almost minute. It’s less than 5%.” The larger change is in occupations that remain the same, such as mechanic, dentist, banker or home decorator. “The idea is not to move from brown jobs to green jobs. It’s to understand how brown jobs can become green.” Anne Chant had earlier given an example of this, describing a decorator who, on his own initiative, changed the paint he uses and how he disposes of the excess.
He also argued that skills forecasting, however useful, cannot settle what is desirable. “The skills intelligence tells us where the labor market is moving. But it does not tell us by itself whether that direction is environmentally or socially desirable.” He gave the example of a city where about 10,000 jobs would be created building electric SUVs: “is that really what we want to do to build more electric SUVs? That’s the future we want?” The reverse also holds, since the cement industry is “totally brown” and yet needs people working on its sustainability. And some technologies behind green jobs have another use: drones that survey farmland “can easily be turned into killer drones for conflict situations“. Anne Chant drew the consequence for practice, saying that skills matching “is completely redundant, because it’s not about skills matching. It never has been, really, if we’re honest.“
Green guidance means integrating environmental sustainability by default
Romain Boitard raised one criticism of the term itself. Most people will assume green guidance means advice about green jobs, which is not the point, and “good career guidance will integrate sustainability by default.” Peter Plant replied at the end of the session that the alternative has the same difficulty, since sustainability has at least four aspects, ecological, economic, social and cultural. “It’s interesting and important to actually take the two and put them together.” Earlier he had raised a related question of scope.
Continuous professional development, communities of practice and peer learning
On training, Romain Boitard was sceptical of distributing materials: “the idea of distributing toolkits does not work.” What changes practice, he said, is “continual professional development, communities of practice, peer learning“. Anne Chant announced that NICE will update the competences and role of career guidance practitioners, and asked anyone who wants to contribute to get in touch. She also argued that guidance should move away from asking young people which job they want and towards asking “what you want your life to look like“. Romain Boitard also warned that funding requests will meet the argument that competitiveness comes first, a view he called mistaken: “we confuse competitiveness and climate action“. Peter Plant reminded participants that the field is not starting from scratch. The OECD’s 2024 working paper lists career education programmes in Canada, the UK, Flanders, the United States, Scotland and France, among others, and he said plainly: “we are now a movement.”
The conclusion was a call to action: Participants can sign the open letter, download the handbook for practitioners and the toolbox, and follow the English-speaking peer supervision, French-speaking Lab Green Guidance and the UK-based Guiding Green Careers group. They were also encouraged to approach the bodies that set national codes of ethics, competency standards, work with the professional association, talk about green guidance, discuss perceived barriers, adapt or develop new tools… And also work with policymakers to adapt quality frameworks, public tender specifications, design of the services. The avenues for actions are numerous – and the guidance community is up to the task!