Career Guidance or Moral Education? A Critical Reading of the ILO Handbook for Career Development

This paper offers a critical reading of the International Labour Organization's Handbook for Career Development (2024), which sets out a career development framework for low- and middle-income countries. It first acknowledges the framework's genuine strengths: its serious treatment of the informal economy as a legitimate site of career development, and its well-grounded recognition that career choices are shaped by family, gender, geography and access to capital. The central argument is that the framework nonetheless commits a category error. It presents contestable ethical and political commitments, such as solidarity and mutual aid, critical consciousness, the challenging of gendered and ethnic structures, and environmental stewardship, as career management competencies with the same epistemic status as more directly career-relevant instrumental skills such as labour-market research, planning or budgeting. Drawing a structural parallel with older conduct and moral-instruction manuals, the paper argues that this move builds a portrait of the ideal citizen rather than an inventory of career-relevant skills, and that folding such values into the definition of career competency withdraws them from open debate by presenting a contestable ethico-political programme as neutral, evidence-based content. The paper proposes a narrower three-part architecture distinguishing career-management capabilities, contextual literacy, and personal and relational resources, while arguing that ethical-civic commitments and structural transformation belong to politics and civic education rather than career guidance.