The need for an all-encompassing approach to lifelong career development occurred due to various socioeconomic and technological changes that we as a society have gone through, and the side-effects in the form of altering education, employment and the labour market. Today’s concept of career significantly differs from its former understanding, when it was thought that a career starts with your first job, and ends with your retirement. Career today is a more dynamic category, including not only your job and money, but learning, family and free time as well.

Career is the interaction of work roles and other life roles over a person’s lifespan, including how they balance paid and unpaid work, and their involvement in learning and education. (ELGPN)

Career guidance should empower the individual to learn how to adapt to increasingly dynamic life conditions and reconcile their various life roles, which are not exclusively job-related. Lifelong career guidance has a great impact on three key fields: education, the economy and employment, and social inclusion.

Research at the European level, and the research done here as well, shows that career guidance has positive effects on the prevention of unemployment, reducing the number of those who drop out of school, increasing interest in school and school achievements, successful transitions from lower to higher levels of education, and in terms of social inclusion. In order for career guidance and counseling to be truly effective in the way described above, it is necessary that this field be systematically set, and then legally and institutionally regulated.

Belgrade Open School works on career guidance and counseling through providing services within the career centre and through numerous activities aimed at the development of career guidance and counseling policies.