Wellbeing

Introduction

This section provides resources for relating career guidance work to outcomes beyond individuals. This page covers discussions that relate career guidance to Wellbeing, showing examples for different challenges and protected groups.

Studies and reviews are included that support in "making the case" for careers for this agenda, and then some specific case study examples of studies that have shown examples of interventions where the outcomes more directly support this agenda There are different mechanisms by which the outcomes are achieved.

This page provides references for the landscape and contextual issues, case studies into practice, relevant research-active institutions, relevant publications, and data sources.

The case for careers

Some of the motivations for considering the opportunities for CEIAG to tackle wellbeing come from evidence of significant problems across both education and employment:

• 35.2 million working days were lost to work-related ill health in 2022/23, with stress, anxiety and depression accounting for almost 24 million of these.employee sickness In 2023, absence is at the highest level the CIPD have reported for15 years and 76% of respondents in a national survey reported taking some stress-related absence.  (CIPD, 2023)
• In education, happiness of children at school has declined markedly since 2010 (Children’s Society, 2023)
• There is a robust international evidence base to show the relationship between unemployment and wellbeing, with longer unemployment periods affecting wellbeing more. (Gedelki, 2022)
• There are strong links between employee performance and wellbeing, though relatively little research has explored the win-win relationship of employees providing greater support (Aubouin-Bonnaventure et al, 2024)
• The charity Mind completed a major initiative in July 2024 to raise the profile of mental health concerns in the workplace, securing commitments from over 3,000 employers (Mind)

Evidence for direct impacts of career guidance on wellbeing have not been studied as much as other outcomes (e.g. Robertson et al, 2013), but this has been changing over more recent years. For instance:

• An international review of evidence found that career counselling can positively impact many of the individual experiences of work and career that correlate directly with wellbeing (Redekopp, D. E., & Huston, M., 2020).
• Career coaching helps women to increase confidence and achieve better and healthier work-life balance (Brown and Yates, 2018).
• Career coaching programmes in high-stress professions (e.g. healthcare) can promote wellbeing and simultaneously produce higher employee performance (Fassiotto et al, 2018).
• In 2022, international researchers, practitioners and career leaders collaborated on a project that examined how wellbeing could be embedded into career guidance practice, culminating in a toolkit with a ten step process. (dmh associates, 2022)
• …As part of this study, it was found that career guidance professionals can lack confidence dealing with wellbeing issues. Case study research in Scotland and Wales shows progress towards clients better wellbeing through career interviews, and interventions that can also help practitioners to increase their confidence to deliver these outcomes (Percy et al, 2024).
• A 2025 meta review of 35 papers provides strong evidence for the mental wellbeing effects of career guidance (Milot‐Lapointe, 2025).

A series of papers by Charles Chen from the University of Toronto from 2020 has also explained how existing career guidance theories and approaches readily lend themselves to adapting to a wide range of situations to promote wellbeing for groups particularly at risk of seeing lower wellbeing due to, or compounded by, career related challenges e.g. recovering cancer patients, ex offenders, people with newly acquired disabilities, people experiencing mid-career layoffs from sectors in decline, and victims of workplace bullying.