Conference Program

Lifelong guidance is often presented as a key tool to reduce social inequalities, but in Italy it still operates within a fragmented “non-system” rather than within integrated policies. In schools, guidance is frequently occasional and deadline-driven, linked to administrative requirements more than to structured career management skills’ education. Moreover, the absence of dedicated experts and shared standards is compounded by highly inadequate indicators of effectiveness. The situation does not improve in the context of labor market policies, where guidance is commonly reduced to mere job placement. Organizational incentives and performance indicators favor quick and measurable outputs instead of quality and sustainable career outcomes. As a result, coordination between education, training, employment services, and third sector organizations remains weak. Information on training options and labor market rules is often not sufficiently “decoded” for users, and responsibility for guidance is widespread but not clearly owned: guidance tasks are delegated to staff who cover them because of role proximity, without solid methods, common tools, or specific accountability. In this context, a frequent “solution” is improvisation: prescriptive interventions focused on immediate choices and short-term jobs, where practitioners decide for the person instead of strengthening agency, self-efficacy, exploration, and responsible decision-making.
The situation of refugees makes these structural problems visible in an amplified way. Refugees face multiple and overlapping transitions (legal status, language, recognition of qualifications, social networks, and implicit workplace norms) that require continuous, integrated guidance. Available evidence suggests that structured career counselling can enhance transferable resources such as career adaptability and both work self-efficacy and job search self-efficacy. However, when guidance is mainly delivered by reception staff or active labor market policy operators without specific training in career guidance, practice tends to follow the immediate demand for employment. In these cases, many potentially formative experiences in the host country are not transformed into career capital: skills remain unrecognized, vocational interests stay weak or poorly differentiated, outcome expectations are unstable, and choices are made with limited information. This increases the risk of deskilling and of being trapped in marginal labor market segments, producing quick but fragile integration.
Refugee pathways, therefore, should not be treated as a niche topic. They work as an indicator of the overall robustness of a lifelong guidance system. The core implication is a shift from fragmented services to integrated lifelong guidance policies: clear professional profiles, shared standards across school and employment sectors, evidence-based training, multi-professional teams, and evaluation metrics that include quality, coherence, and sustainability of outcomes, not only contrast to early school leaving placement.