Changing career guidance practice in Connexions: a question of ethics?

What has happened to the career guidance profession in the English 14-19 sector since the formation of Connexions? This is the central focus of a research project we have just completed. Our findings, as we shall explain here, raise serious questions about the transformation of careers work in England. In part, it poses some thorny issues about the day-to-day ethics of this work that, we believe, the Institute of Career Guidance and the profession as a whole need to address.
As we reported at the start of our research (CGT June 2008, ‘Researching for an answer’), one of our key concerns was to focus on the voices and experiences of career guidance (CG) trained practitioners themselves, which had been little heard in previous research on Connexions – not least because future policy-making for career guidance is unlikely to have an adequate evidence-base without an understanding of practitioners’ perspectives.
We wanted to find out what it has meant for Careers Advisers to become Personal Advisers (PAs); how their worked has evolved; what has happened to their knowledge and skills in the process; how this has affected their professional identity and status; and what they perceive their support and development needs to be for the future. What we did not expect was the extent to which day-to-day ethical dilemmas – and pressures to engage in unethical practice – emerged as a very powerful theme in their accounts.