2026-01-04

Why study and career guidance matters more now than ever: guidance in a time of rapid change

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Swedish students make decisions that will shape the rest of their lives. They choose upper secondary programmes, courses and post-secondary studies, setting a course towards a future working life – often without a complete picture of what the choice actually entails. That is nothing new. But it now happens in a context that is fundamentally different from just ten years ago. The labour market is changing faster than Arbetsförmedlingen (the Swedish Public Employment Service) or any statistical system can fully capture. Occupations that once offered lifelong security are being reshaped within a few years. Jobs that did not exist yesterday are tomorrow's sought-after skills. It is in this situation that study and career guidance plays a decisive role. It is a fundamental support for young people's right to make well-informed decisions about their future.

What is study and career guidance?

Study and career guidance – abbreviated SYV in Swedish – is the support students are entitled to so that they can make well-informed choices about their education and future working life (note that in Sweden the profession itself, the guidance counsellor, is also commonly abbreviated SYV). Study and career guidance is not about pointing out the right answer or steering students towards a particular option, but about giving every student the conditions they need to find their own answers. Under the Swedish Education Act, chapter 2, section 29, all students from compulsory school through to adult education have the right to access staff with the competence to meet their particular guidance needs. It is a statutory right, not an optional offering that a school can choose to prioritise or disregard.

Good study and career guidance is about helping students develop what research often calls career decision-making skills. The concept encompasses four fundamental abilities: self-knowledge, knowledge of the available options, the ability to make a well-informed decision, and the ability to actually carry it out. All four need to be in place for a choice to feel meaningful and sustainable over time. It is complex work that requires time, subject expertise and a relationship between student and counsellor.

In practice, guidance takes many forms. It might be one-to-one conversations with a student who does not know what they want, group sessions on how upper secondary admission works, teaching about the labour market and occupations embedded in ordinary lessons, or digital information that students explore on their own. The breadth of the assignment is one of the reasons it is so complex to do really well – and one of the reasons it is so important that it is genuinely prioritised.

A labour market changing faster than we can measure

Something has changed in recent years that makes it harder to give guidance about future occupations. The labour market is being reshaped at a pace that neither individual students, schools nor society's institutions are prepared for. Arbetsförmedlingen notes in its own reports that the changes are happening faster than the statistical systems can capture. That is a truly remarkable statement. It means that the tools we use to understand where the jobs are – and where they no longer are – always lag one step behind reality.

The primary driving force behind the change is AI and automation. The Swedish Labour Market AI Council (Arbetsmarknadens AI-råd), which brings together actors from business, academia and public authorities, has concluded in its reports that AI is above all changing job tasks and skills requirements rather than wiping out occupations altogether. According to the council, 150,000 Swedish jobs are expected to change as a result of AI. That means the content of an occupation – what you are expected to know and what is automated away – shifts fundamentally. For someone planning their future career, that is just as decisive as if the job disappeared entirely.

Globally, the picture is similar but even more dramatic in scale. In its Future of Jobs Report 2025, the World Economic Forum estimates that 92 million jobs will disappear by 2030, while 170 million new ones are created over the same period. The net effect is positive, but it conceals an enormous redistribution of skills, industries and geographies. None of the 170 million new jobs exist today in the form they will soon take. That makes it next to impossible to give a year-nine student a straight answer to the question of what constitutes a safe career choice.

What is particularly striking about the current shift is that it does not primarily hit low-skilled industrial occupations, as previous waves of automation did. It is the knowledge-intensive professions that are now most affected: law, finance, engineering, administration and communication. These are industries that for generations have offered stable, well-paid employment to those with an academic education. A study from Örebro University and the independent research institute Ratio, published in 2025, shows that young people aged 22 to 25 are hit hardest. Since the breakthrough of the large language models, employment in AI-exposed occupations has fallen by 6.5 per cent for the younger age group, while it has risen slightly for those aged 50 or older. Employers appear to choose experience even in a time of technological change, creating an additional barrier for those entering the labour market for the first time.

The students who have to choose in the middle of all this

It is against this backdrop that a year-nine student applies to upper secondary school, or an upper secondary student wonders what comes after graduation. It is not surprising that many feel anxious. Ungdomsbarometern's Generation Report 2025 shows that 45 per cent of young people in Sweden see society's future as bleak, and that 53 per cent believe their generation will be worse off economically and socially than the previous one. That is a clear majority. Globally, four in ten of Gen Z report feeling worried about how AI and automation will affect their career opportunities. Paradoxically, 47 per cent of the same generation use generative AI every week. The technology is already part of everyday life. It is not ignorance driving the worry, but rather a genuine uncertainty about what it means for the future.

There is also a paradox in how young people perceive their own path towards the labour market. While 53 per cent of young Swedes believe their generation as a whole will be worse off than the previous one, 76 per cent view their own personal future positively. In other words, the worry is not directed inward at their own lives but outward at society at large. Young people seem to be saying: I believe in myself, but I am unsure about the system I have to navigate. This means young people are not passive or resigned in the face of change – they are looking for tools and support to make well-informed choices in an uncertain time. The need for guidance is not about calming down a generation that has given up, but about equipping a generation that genuinely wants to move forward.

That said, in 2024 almost 67,000 young people aged 15 to 24 were neither working nor studying. Youth unemployment rose to its highest level in three years. The share of young people who believe they would struggle to find a new job with a comparable salary if they lost theirs increased from 22 to 29 per cent in a single year. Elsa Alm, youth secretary at the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO), put words to what the figures describe: "Many feel a sense of hopelessness." That is an observation about an entire generation's view of its own opportunities, not about individual people's lack of ambition. The choices students make at school – which programme they choose and whether they understand what is actually required to get where they want to go – are of course shaped by their faith in the future.

A remit that has grown faster than the resources behind it

The Education Act is clear. All students are entitled to guidance. And across the country there are guidance counsellors doing decisive work every day: meeting students in one-to-one conversations, running group sessions, collaborating with teachers and coordinating contacts with working life. It is work that demands broad competence – psychology, pedagogy, conversational methodology, labour market knowledge – and that, at its best, gives students exactly the support they need to move forward.

But the level of ambition for study and career guidance has grown. The labour market is more complex, students' needs more varied, and the expectation that guidance should permeate the whole school (rather than being something that happens on a couple of occasions) has increased. It is a development everyone in the school world can feel: counsellors, headteachers and school authorities alike. And this is where it becomes clear that the conditions have not kept pace.

An average guidance counsellor at upper secondary level is responsible for an estimated 400–500 students. In practical terms, that means one or two individual conversations per student per year – and often even fewer, since time must also cover group sessions, administration and collaboration with colleagues. It is a clear measure of how the assignment as a whole has grown faster than the resources available.

Why study and career guidance is more important than ever before

It is tempting to think that digitalisation and the availability of information online reduce the need for human guidance. Every programme can be found on public agency websites. Salary statistics are available from Statistics Sweden. Occupational descriptions can be read on Arbetsförmedlingen's pages. But more information does not automatically lead to better decisions. As the number of options grows and information becomes fragmented, the need for support in processing and evaluating it grows too. A rapidly changing labour market also makes it harder, not easier, to work out on your own which programme, which degree or which skills will actually be relevant in five years. The counsellor who follows the changes in the labour market, strengthens students' ability to choose and can place a student's strengths and interests in context fills a role that no search engine can yet replace. It is a combination of factual knowledge, relational skill and the ability to help a young person truly understand themselves.

Study and career guidance is also about far more than career choice in a narrow sense. Students who choose a programme for the wrong reasons – based on what their friends choose or what their parents prefer rather than a well-founded picture of what suits them – pay a high price, personally in time and frustration, and financially in restarts and lost income. Here, study and career guidance plays an important proactive, preventive role. There is also a clear equality dimension. Without systematic, well-resourced guidance work, the students who already have the least tend to lose the most.

Closing words

At a time when more than half of all young people believe their generation will be worse off, when youth unemployment is rising and the demands of the labour market are changing at a pace statistics can barely measure, study and career guidance is one of the most important tools a school has. It deserves more resources, more structure and more support.

About Skoolie

Skoolie is a digital support for study and career guidance, built together with counsellors to strengthen their work. The platform gathers information about each student's grades, interests and goals in one place, gives the counsellor a stronger basis ahead of every conversation, and lets students explore their options in depth on their own. The idea is simple: to free up time for the conversations that actually make a difference.

Would you like to know more about how Skoolie is used in Swedish municipalities and schools? Book a walkthrough here.