Abstract
Building on 2009 and 2025 position papers on career counselling, and on the fourth paradigm for careers in the XXIst century, this article proposes a transformational framework for career counselling in line with the Anthropocene era and the emerging Counsellocene perspective in career counselling. It investigated how career counselling could respond to technological disruption, socio-economic inequality, and ecological crises to help people construct meaningful, hopeful, and sustainable career-lives. Recent scholarship was synthesised based on an adapted qualitative systematic literature review. Deductively, and drawing on well-established theoretical frameworks, five thematic domains were uncovered. Inductively, subthemes of these domains were identified. The findings suggested that career counselling practice move towards transdisciplinary approaches that engage people as active authors of their career-lives against the backdrop of social justice and planetary imperatives. The proposed model emphasises agency, hope, and adaptability while helping people recognise their roles in reversing environmental degradation and building equitable futures.
Introduction: The Anthropocene Era and the Changing World of Work
The postmodern world of work is shaped by rapid technological development, climate change, and inequality (*Shealy et al., 2021; *Suzanne et al., 2025). These trends challenge the foundations of career counselling, which traditionally focused on stable career-life trajectories that are separated from ecological and sustainability concerns. The Anthropocene – a period defined by the practical, psychological, educational, and emotional human impact on Earth's systems (Elgin, 2024; Guichard, 2022; Ly, 2023; *Maree, 2024) – calls for connecting career development to broader planetary and ethical questions. However, this article focuses on the ‘Counsellocene’ (*Maree, 2024) aligned with the fourth paradigm (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) for careers in the XXIst century which includes new interventions for career counselling and new skills for career counsellors. *Hartung and Di Fabio (2024) asserted that “sustainable development involves embracing an inclusive perspective of respect for nature as a whole (animals, plants, and the planet), incorporating future generations and future life on the Earth” (p. 207). Jointly with the fourth paradigm (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) the ‘Counsellocene’ perspective (*Maree, 2024) advocates for reinvigorating career counselling interventions, suggesting the integration of career construction theory, self-construction, and the psychology of sustainability and sustainable development. It also holds that career counselling should help people create narratives and make choices that link individual fulfilment with collective wellbeing. Based on a systematic literature review, this article identifies trends and shortcomings in current career counselling and (1) explains the five key themes; (2) offers a conceptual framework based on a narrative approach and sustainability; and (3) proposes recommendations for advancing the ‘Counsellocene’ perspective globally.
Why Sustainability and Eco-Awareness Matter in Career Counselling
In an earlier article (*Maree, 2024), the focus was on designing, identifying, and furthering creative approaches that could help career counselling respond purposefully to environmental crises, social inequalities, and technological disruptions. The article aimed to reposition career counselling as an inclusive and context-sensitive practice that nurtures hope and agency in an increasingly precarious world. By contrast, the current article moves beyond merely adapting to transformation – it envisages career counsellors as not only facilitators of personal meaning-making but also as active agents (*Lent et al., 2023) in co-constructing sustainable career-lives that blend ecological awareness with career-life story narratives.
From Innovation to Transformation: Moving Beyond Earlier Contributions
Authors such as Tripathy (2022) and *Sulich et al. (2021) argue that the new occupational world is marked by interconnected transformations, including technological advancements, climate crises, global inequalities, demographic changes, and shifting work and employment patterns, all of which are adding to wellbeing and mental health challenges (*Caringal-Go et al., 2024). These transformations call for sustainable, ethical business practices when such practices are at an all-time low. Individually and jointly, these changes call into question some of the fundamental assumptions that have traditionally informed career intervention theory and practice (*Maree, 2025; *Spurk, 2021). Economic activity can no longer be detached from socio-ecological actualities. Researchers today maintain that career counselling has to rise above market-driven paradigms and engage with a world marked by rapid changes in work and careers (Di Fabio, 2023a, 2023b; Di Fabio & Blustein, 2016; Di Fabio et al., 2023; Savickas, 2019). The emphasis in career counselling has shifted towards promoting the sustainability of societies and environments on which all livelihoods are dependent (Samuel, 2023).
In the context outlined so far in this article, knowledge of the Anthropocene (the current epoch in which human actions are the dominant force shaping climates and ecosystems) (Johnson et al., 2022; O'Hare, 2020; Pavid, 2020) has become a practical requirement for career counselling development practice because its challenges, which include biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and global warming, affect career identities, labour markets, and career choices. At the same time, deepening socio-economic disparities increase the need for flexible and adaptive career-life trajectories across the globe.
The Counsellocene perspective (*Maree, 2024), in conjunction with the fourth paradigm (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) for careers in the XXIst century, conceptualises career counselling as an integrative, qualitative-quantitative, and transdisciplinary intervention and therapy with eco-awareness and social justice at its heart. These contributions envisage career counselling as an intervention to help people (co-)author narratives and make choices that enhance personal and communal fulfilment. It encourages career counselling theorists, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to see career counselling as a transformative service aimed at (co-)constructing sustainable, just, and hopeful futures for all (*Hora, 2023).
Theoretical Background
Self-Construction Theory (SCT)
Self-construction theory (Guichard, 2009) positions people as proactive agents continuously striving to attain self-organisation and preserve continuity in their career-lives. Central to this theory is the notion that people construct themselves in explicit ways, contingent on how they relate to themselves during critical times and within significant life contexts (Guichard, 2022). Self-construction counselling (SCC) operationalises this idea through self-reflection activities that elicit people's values and life-giving elements (Guichard, 2018). These activities enable people to articulate what matters to them and align their evolving identities with chosen career pathways.
By acknowledging multiple realities, adaptive processes, and the human search for coherence, SCT provides a flexible and future-oriented framework for counselling. Its emphasis on identity as narrative sets the stage for career counselling approaches that move beyond psychometric measurement towards meaning-making.
Career Construction Theory (CCT)
While self-construction theory offers a foundation for understanding identity processes, career construction theory (Savickas, 2015) translates these insights into a framework for understanding career-related behaviour and creating sound counselling practice. Built upon and extending Super's (1990) lifespan, life-space theory, CCT integrates three major traditions (differential (person-environment fit), developmental, and psychodynamic/narrative approaches) into an inclusive model that situates careers as stories of adaptation, integration, and contribution. CCT is premised on the idea that people construct their careers by imposing meaning on vocational experiences. Occupation is a mechanism for earning a living and a means of social integration and contribution (Savickas, 2015). Counselling, therefore, must enable people to understand, narrate, and adapt their career-lives to enhance both self-realisation and social connectedness. Counsellors and clients collaborate to elicit, deconstruct, co-construct, and reconstruct people's multiple career-life stories (narratives) into a coherent, grand career-life story. This process promotes reflexivity, emotional expression, and the normalisation of career-related challenges (Cardoso et al., 2021). Indigenous (African) perspectives align positively with CCT's emphasis on co-construction, relational reflexivity, and socially embedded meaning-making. By shifting the focus from ‘scores’ to stories (Maree, 2022), CCT offers a dynamic framework for understanding how people adapt to global changes, unpredictable work environments, and cultural realities.
Life Design Theory (LDT)
Emerging from SCT and CCT, life design theory (Savickas, 2015; Savickas et al., 2009) marks a paradigm shift in career counselling. It responds to the volatility of the twenty-first-century labour market by focusing on ‘career choice’ and designing meaningful lives through work and relationships. Life design theory recognises that careers are constructed in contexts of uncertainty, non-linearity, and multiple social roles. Interventions based on it are therefore lifelong, holistic, and context sensitive.
Life design counselling (LDC) is organised around five factors: (1) contextual possibilities, (2) dynamic processes, (3) non-linear progressions, (4) multiple perspectives, and (5) personal patterns (Savickas et al., 2009). It averts poor self- and career construction by offering preventive guidance, addressing childhood and adulthood experiences, and emphasising positive change across the lifespan.
Central to LDT are four interrelated dimensions: career adaptability (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012), narratability (*Cripps & Bobeva, 2025; Savickas, 2019), intentionality (Maree & Morgan, 2012), and activity (Savickas, 2019).
These dimensions ensure that life design counselling facilitates meaning-making and promotes employability, resilience, and purposeful living.
Integrative Perspective
Life design counselling intervention operationalises SCT and CCT insights by providing a structured yet flexible meta-framework for practice. It foregrounds adaptability and narrativity as dual anchors: adaptability addresses change while narratability ensures continuity. Together, they empower people to design futures marked by coherence, hope, and contribution. LDT extends both SCT and CCT into a global perspective aligned with the fourth paradigm (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) for careers in the XXIst century, responding to the fluidity of modern careers by emphasising lifelong adaptability, narrativity, intentionality, and action.
The Psychology of Sustainability and Sustainable Development
Sustainability Science (Komiyama & Takeuchi, 2006; Sahle et al., 2024; Takeuchi et al., 2017) is a current discipline that, with valuable contributions of Marc Rosen (Rosen, 2009, 2017), emphasises the value of a transdisciplinary approach for addressing the challenges of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of the Agenda 2030 and beyond.
Within Sustainability Science, the Psychology of Sustainability and Sustainable Development area of research and intervention was officially founded in 2016 in the scientific journal Sustainability Science by Di Fabio. Pioneering work on the Psychology of Sustainability and Sustainable Development (PSSD) includes Di Fabio (2017, 2021, 2023a, 2023b; Di Fabio & Cooper, 2023; Di Fabio & Peiró, 2018, 2023; Di Fabio & Rosen, 2018, 2020; *Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024; Rosen & Di Fabio, 2023) offering contributions to sustainability and sustainable development using psychological lenses.
About career counselling in the PSSD framework, Di Fabio (2023a, 2023b), *Öztürk and Pizmony-Levy (2021), and *Peiró et al. (2023) indicate that career counselling should extend beyond merely finding ‘a job’ and instead promote employability, activity, and productivity. Like several other authors, *Müller and Scheffer (2022) argue that sustainability should have the following features:
Promoting sustainable wellbeing by helping people construct careers that cultivate their long-term psychological health, career resilience, and career-life satisfaction (*Müller & Scheffer, 2022). Promoting eco-existential awareness by encouraging people to reflect on their unique existential space within their ecosystem and to assume responsibility for the planet. Accentuating (Di Fabio, 2023a, 2023b) the integration of individual development with planetary sustainability to show the connection between self-fulfilment and ecological guardianship.
The applicability of the theories referred to above vests in their conceptual sophistication and practical usefulness. They provide career construction counsellors with benchmarks for assessing career counselling and related interventions, blending research and practical evidence, and facilitating research questions anchored in hope and contextual sensitivity.
The Theory of Eco-Awareness
Eco-awareness refers to the conscious acknowledgement of the interrelationship between ecological systems and people's career-lives and the belief that individual and communal actions influence planetary sustainability. From a theoretical perspective, eco-awareness extends environmental identity (Edwards et al., 2023), modern-day sustainability science (Steffen et al., 2015), and ecological psychology (Bronfenbrenner & Evans, 2000). In career counselling, eco-awareness includes incorporating environmental responsibility into career-life construction and design.
Eco-awareness thus represents a reflexive stance that inspires people to reflect on questions such as: “How do my career-related choices affect and shape ecological systems?” and “What are my responsibilities, through my work-related efforts, towards current and future generations as well as the planet?” Seen through this prism, career counselling is an ethical practice that must move beyond employability to embrace stewardship, sustainability, and transformation.
Authors such as Di Fabio and Cooper (2023), Di Fabio and Rosen (2018), Guichard (2022), and *Hartung and Di Fabio (2024) maintain that eco-awareness is cognitive as well as existential in that it encompasses nurturing an ecological identity, enhancing responsibility, and bolstering people's sense of belonging within the Earth system. It anchors career construction through nurturing hope, meaning, adaptability, and social justice (advocacy).
From Test-and-Tell to a Call for the Fourth Paradigm in Career Counselling in the Counsellocene Perspective
Some of the major objections to earlier approaches (see, for instance, Savickas (2016) and Savickas and Savickas (2019) include the inflexible nature of these approaches, the acceptance of the counsellor's role as the so-called expert, and contextual and cultural insensitivity. In responding to these shortcomings, career counselling has gradually evolved through multiple paradigms. Yet, current global realities call for a fourth paradigm for career in the XXIst century (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) that expands the scope of career counselling beyond individual self-fulfilment to embrace collective societal and planetary sustainability. Such a paradigm requires a re-imagination of career not merely as personal advancement, but as a contribution to collective and ecological wellbeing (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024; *Međugorac et al., 2019). By integrating career construction theory with sustainability science and social justice principles, the new paradigm will help people design lives that are adaptable, purposeful, and ecologically responsible (*Öztürk & Pizmony-Levy, 2021). Integrating the five theoretical orientations discussed above will position career counselling as a transformative practice (*Rabenu & Baruch, 2024) that can address not only individual needs but also the broader challenges of our time.
The 2009 and 2025 position papers referred to earlier (the 2009 Life Design Manifesto (Savickas et al., 2009), the 2025 Anthropocene Reformulation (*Cohen-Scali et al., 2025), and the fourth paradigm for careers in the XXIst century (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) are discussed below to set the scene for professional reflection on evolving approaches to career counselling in the Anthropocene.
Position Papers in Dialogue: Tracing the Field of Career Counselling's Evolution
The 2009 Life Design Position Paper
In response to fundamental changes in the world of work over the preceding decades, Savickas et al. (2009) published a seminal position paper on life design that laid the groundwork for understanding career development in rapidly changing work contexts. Whereas these authors introduced the notion of life design to deal with evolving challenges in the occupational world, more recently *Cohen-Scali et al. (2025) extended this notion to include life design interventions in the contemporary Anthropocene context, aligned with the fourth paradigm for careers in the XXIst century (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024).
The Fourth Paradigm for Careers in the XXI Century
The fourth paradigm for careers in the XXIst century (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024) shifts the attention toward sustainability, fairness, and creating meaningful work that supports people's career-lives. This paradigm asserts that careers are shaped by the broader world (people's communities, the economy, and the environment). Moreover, it encourages people to think about how they can help others grow and adapt amid constant change and make the systems around them more humane, just, and fair. From this perspective, it calls on practitioners to contribute to healthier, more supportive conditions in society as a whole.
The 2025 Position Paper
Building on the 2009 article, and aligned with the fourth paradigm for careers in the XXIst century (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024), *Cohen-Scali et al. (2025) recently published a new position paper that extends and updates the framework for life design in the light of the contemporary Anthropocene era, which expands the field by including social justice, eco-awareness, and a sense of collective responsibility for promoting eco-awareness and sustainability. The authors argue that career counselling models should respond to individual needs in changing labour markets in addition to responding to global ecological crises. They should include new ethical principles along with the concept of ‘forms of life’ and redefine career counselling to help people construct and co-construct sustainable, active life forms as part of the Earth system (Guichard, 2022).
Points of Convergence and Continuity
The major correspondences between the two position papers, in my view, are that both reject older trait-and-stage models, favouring dynamic and holistic approaches and seeing careers as constructed in social contexts rather than determined by fixed traits (*Rabenu & Baruch, 2024). Both papers advocate for lifelong, narrative counselling centred on meaning and ethics. Both also stress the need for adaptability, reflection, and the need for people to navigate complexity and change rather than merely providing them with labour market information.
Key Differences and Changes
Whereas the 2009 paper focuses mainly on helping people construct meaningful lives in uncertain, globalised labour markets, the 2025 paper responds to Anthropo-Capitalocene crises, emphasising sustainability, eco-awareness and social justice (*Međugorac et al., 2019). Also, while the primary drivers of the 2009 paper are adaptability and meaning making, the 2025 article focuses on the need to transform collective and individual lifestyles to protect life on Earth. Moreover, the 2009 paper is grounded in social constructionism, narratives, and contextual self-construction, while the 2025 paper is based on care ethics, responsibility, hope, limited Earth-system thinking, and ‘forms of life’ (*Cohen-Scali et al., 2025). Whereas the 2009 paper supports adaptability and coherence across life domains, the 2025 paper argues that people must construct sustainable lives aligned with social justice and ecological goals. It introduces the following ethical principles: limited Earth-system, care, responsibility, truth, hope, activity, and capability and critiques existing career interventions for focusing too narrowly on employability, skills, and technology. It also reframes the central counselling question as: “How can I choose a career and design my active life to promote a fair and sustainable society?”. It encourages interventions that help people live more sustainably, ethically, and collectively.
Career Counselling and Life Design: Comparing the 2009 and 2025 Position Papers and the Fourth Paradigm for Careers in the XXI Century
Comparing the 2009 and 2025 position papers on career counselling and life design can help researchers trace career counselling's evolution over 16 years and see how the discipline has progressed from focusing primarily on individual adaptability in fast-changing labour markets to emphasising communal responsibility, environmental consciousness (eco-awareness), and sustainable futures. This comparison shows the continuity in theoretical underpinnings and how the career counselling field has adapted to meet emerging global career-life related challenges.
Research Goals and Question
This article has three goals, namely 1) identifying and explaining central themes and subthemes that typify contemporary deliberations on innovative as well as sustainable career counselling interventions, 2) envisaging a conceptual framework grounded in narrative (storied), integrative, sustainable, transformative, and contextual meaning and relevance, and 3) offering practicable recommendations for theory, policy, practice, and research in distinct contexts, especially in developing country (Global South) contexts.
A single research question guided the research: “How does the postmodern literature on life design intervention and career construction counselling inform the construction of sustainable futures and the advancement of eco-awareness in the Counsellocene perspective?” Drawing on an adapted qualitative systematic literature review, and working both deductively and inductively, the available literature was first synthesised deductively. guided by existing theoretical frameworks. Five thematic domains were uncovered: 1) sustainability and sustainable careers; 2) innovative counselling approaches, including narrative, life design, and digital instruments; 3) socio-technical and cultural contexts; 4) education, employability, and curriculum reform (*Heirs & Manuel, 2021), and 5) psychological and personal dimensions such as meaning making and adaptability. An inductive approach was then applied to the data to identify nuanced subthemes within these main themes (*Heirs & Manuel, 2021). These subthemes reveal how eco-awareness, culture, technology, and narrative methods intersect in contemporary life design and career counselling, presenting a holistic view of sustainable career development in the Counsellocene.
Methodology
Systematic Review
An adapted qualitative systematic review was undertaken. Ms Liesl Stieger (Senior Academic Information Specialist, University of Pretoria) conducted a broad search on Google Scholar in June-July 2025 to identify possible search terms and databases to consult. The EBSCOHOST platform, with 41 databases, formed the basis of the search, while Taylor and Francis, Springer, and Sage Journals were also included.
Keyword combinations included: ‘career development’ OR ‘career counselling’ OR ‘life design’ OR ‘career construction’ OR ‘career guidance AND ‘environmental sustainability’ OR ‘eco-consciousness’, ‘eco-awareness’ OR ‘green’. The total number of results on the EBSCOHOST platform in 41 databases was 2 689 articles. After removing 157 duplicates, Ms. Stieger screened 2 532 records by title and abstract. She subsequently excluded 1 241 articles as irrelevant. The full texts of 1 291 articles were assessed and 1 263 excluded (e.g., not peer-reviewed, conceptual only, outside scope). Ultimately, 27 articles met the inclusion criteria and were synthesised (see PRISMA flowchart, Figure 1).
PRISMA flowchart.
An integrated deductive-inductive approach steered the analysis. In the first phase, deductive coding (informed by career construction theory, life design, and sustainable social development and eco-awareness) was used to identify five a priori thematic areas. In the second phase, inductive coding was used in these areas to identify nascent subthemes. The nuanced ways in which sustainability and eco-awareness are incorporated into career counselling were captured in the process. The process was conducted systematically to promote rigour and transparency. Moreover, coding was carried out manually in line with Braun and Clarke's (Braun et al., 2019) guidelines for thematic analysis.
Limiters included: publication date 2020–2025 (the past five years), English language, and peer-reviewed articles with these limiters, resulting in the reduction of the total number of articles to 278. Additional databases included green careers (‘career counselling’ OR ‘career development’ OR ‘vocational guidance’ OR ‘vocational counselling’ OR ‘occupational guidance’), limited to the last five years.
Results
As mentioned earlier, the final number of articles used for a qualitative systematic review was 31 in the concluding synthesis. The design balanced depth to examine for cultural explicitness, narrative (storied) mechanisms, and impartiality implications with breadth to encapsulate developing work such as Industry 5.0 (which shifts the focus from efficiency to a human-centric, sustainable, and resilient industrial approach), a ‘career-first’ labour market integration, and SETS peer learning (*Feagan et al., 2023; *Fuertes et al., 2021). This configuration is consistent with the life design approach and the intervention's favouring of stories (qualitative information) above scores (quantitative data).
As mentioned earlier, five overarching themes were identified (see Table 1, below). The analysis also revealed gaps in the literature, for instance, limited cross-cultural research on how disadvantaged populations interpret eco-awareness; inconsistent integration of digital instruments; and little empirical evidence on narrative approaches in non-Western contexts.
Main Themes and Subthemes Identified in the Literature Review.
Discussion
Methodological Perspectives on the Adapted Qualitative Systematic Literature Review
Three observations regarding the review warrant mention at this stage. First, the review corroborated a definitive shift from testing-and-telling towards storied, contextual, and multi- and transdisciplinary practice (as evident in both position papers). Second, the following gaps were identified: inadequate cross-cultural evidence in developing countries (Global South) contexts, especially the disproportionate use of digital/AI interventions and strategies, and incomplete empirical assessment of storied (narrative) methods outside Western contexts. Third, the thematic map harmonised well with the envisaged Counsellocene prism: novel (innovative) approaches, socio-technical and socio-cultural contexts, sustainability, education, employability, transformation, and identity dimensions. These themes jointly propose reimagining counselling as a transformative endeavour, bringing together planetary viability and justice with individual meaning, purpose, and hope.
Gaps in the Scholarship
The review identified central thematic trends, patterns, and important gaps. The gaps revealed that although action-oriented, proactive, and innovative approaches are increasingly gaining traction (*Qalati et al., 2025), substantial challenges remain. As other researchers have shown, these challenges include inadequate empirical research in non-Western, developing country contexts, especially poor integration of eco-awareness, and un- and underexplored junctions of sustainability, cultural identity, employability, and transformation. The aim was to shed light on how twenty-first-century career counselling scholarship is reframing career counselling in the Anthropocene, shifting eco-awareness, social justice, and advocacy from the fringes to the heart of theoretical and practical considerations in career counselling.
As much as the chosen methodological design promotes transferability, several limitations must be acknowledged here. These include the possibility of publication bias towards English as the publication medium of robust peer-reviewed articles and unavoidable exclusions of so-called grey literature and practice narratives that could potentially contain constructive and valuable Global Southern insights. Rather than diminishing its significance, these shortcomings highlight the need for the perspective shift discussed in this article, aligned with the fourth paradigm for careers in the XXIst century (*Hartung & Di Fabio, 2024).
The Main and Subthemes are Discussed Below
Sustainability and Sustainable Careers
Eco-Awareness in Career Choices
Comparative studies reveal that people today increasingly aspire to careers that can lead to stewardship rather than success only – a change indicating a key pivotal value turn. More people are weighing career decisions against social contribution, ecological footprint, and projected future harm or benefit to social-ecological systems (*Lent & Brown, 2020).
Questions such as “What can I do?” are reframed as existential questions of meaning and responsibility, such as “Who do I choose to be for others and the Earth?” (Elgin, 2024). This change signifies a move in line with life design.
Innovative Career Counselling Approaches
Narrative and Life Design Methods
Many authors (for instance, Hartung, 2015; Savickas, 2016) have shown that life design is at the heart of current career counselling practice. Career construction interventions, strategies, interviews, and associated techniques can elicit key life themes, convert them into macro-narratives, and co-construct practicable future-oriented actions. These processes invite eco-existential questioning.
AI-Enhanced and Digital Instruments and Strategies
Although digital platforms, learning communities, and AI assistants can promote reflection, reflexivity, meta-reflection, widen access, and personalise career-life trajectories, care should be taken to ensure equity, privacy, and cultural appropriateness (*Fernández-Macías et al., 2023). The review provides grounds for optimism (such as peer-led online SETS learning), yet it also warns about the risk of the digital divide. Career counsellors should therefore treat technology as a mediator of agency (action) rather than as a replacement for personal relationships (Blustein & Flores, 2023).
‘Career-First’ Frameworks and the Capability Approach
Career-first frameworks and the capability approach support life design by focusing on what people can realistically do in their daily lives. In contexts where work opportunities are not guaranteed and unstable (*France et al., 2022), these approaches help people design practical short-term steps while staying true to their core, long-term values. They thus balance the immediate need to survive with the ongoing desire for meaningful work. This ethical challenge is especially conspicuous in Global Southern settings.
Universal Relevance
The 2009 and 2025 position papers above argue for universal relevance grounded in fundamental narrative ethics (such as truth, concern, hope, and activity) while collaboratively constructing culturally sensitive and meaningful practices such as Ujamaa, Ubuntu, Isinti, and collectivist interpretations (Le Grange, 2012).
Innovation and post-modernisation in the field of career counselling are less about devices than about revitalising purposes. This can be achieved by drawing on stories, communities, cultural drifts, and ‘careful technology’ to project people as motivated agents qualified to shape just and sustainable futures.
Socio-Technical and Socio-Cultural Contexts
Smart Cities and Digital Workplaces
Work is being re-remodelled by platformisation (digital platforms expanding into various sectors), automation, and appropriate and timely city-scale infrastructure (a city-wide scope). Sustainable careers require ‘socio-technical sight’ (in other words, the capacity to interpret how instruments, rules, and spaces (*Curşeu et al., 2020) can (re-)configure opportunities and setbacks and adversity. Career counsellors are obliged to help people anticipate key skills for Industry 5.0 (Work 5.0) while standing firm against techno-solutionism by accentuating human dignity in tandem with environmental thresholds. Matthews (2025, p. 9) cautions that “In the absence of relevant [and attainable] work tasks, a workplace can feel pointless (at best) or even threatening” and turn the workplace into a ‘bad’ space.
Global North-South Inequalities
As mentioned earlier, access to decent work, career counselling services, facilities, and opportunities to participate in blue and green transitions remains uneven (Evans et al., 2023; OECD, 2025). The review emphasises a persistent bias in ‘evidence production’ and ‘model export’ from the North to the South.
Cultural Adaptation
Including and integrating indigenous philosophies of personhood (self-identity) and interrelatedness expands resonance and moderates epistemic harm. Methodologically, this strategy entails co-designing with and drawing on the indigenous knowledge of local communities, multi-lingual resources, and collective decision-making, especially in disadvantaged rural and under-resourced areas.
Structural Barriers
People do not make career choices in a void – all choices have a history. Factors such as structural racism, labour subdivision shaped by gender, policy sluggishness, and brittle labour safety nets inhibit opportunity. Career counselling should therefore have a double focus, namely standing by individual people while at the same time dealing with the broader system (*Hopner & Carr, 2024). Advocacy at all levels (such as education and training institutions and policy domains) is a key facet of best practice based on ethical principles. Only career counselling that appreciates and engages with its particular context will remain relevant in current occupational contexts characterised by social injustice, inequality, indecision, ambiguity, and changing technology (Siltala et al., 2025).
Education, Employability, and Curriculum Reform
Entrenching Sustainability in Education
The review revealed efforts to incorporate sustainability into education and training curricula, career education, guidance, development, counselling, and work-integrated learning. SDGs and environmental literacy and sustainability (Hotaling, 2021; *Parola & Felaco, 2024; Salmon et al., 2024) should therefore be regarded as cross-sectional and disciplinary requirements (*Enriquez et al., 2022) to promote the common good (Sternberg, 2007) rather than steps or ladders to increase career-life flexibility and upward (forward) movement.
Early Interventions and Transformative Educational and Training Programmes
Research has shown that early intervention that encourages reflection on spaces, values, situations, and community promotes (career) adaptability, (career) resilience, and an altruistic focus. Transformative educational and training programmes complement problem-solving assignments with narrative reflection, meta-reflection, and reflexivity, empowering young people to experiment with sustainable career-life identities before entering the world of work.
Online and Peer-led Learning
Peer spaces and cross-disciplinary work spaces that enhance blue and green infrastructure development and find climate change solutions promote communal efficacy and personal and work-related growth and development. To achieve this, safe, diverse, real-world-oriented communities must construct the community resources and social networks learners will require to maintain ethical career-lives.
Buttressing Agency Beliefs
Educational and training programmes should assess and develop “career confidence for activities in the future” (*Valbusa et al., 2025, p. 6), align capstones (demonstration of learners’ control of study fields, modules, or particular subjects) with SDG aims, and incentivise community-ecological involvement.
Education and training organisations centred on caring for the planet should aim to produce graduates who are better equipped to design meaningful and reformative career lives.
Psychological and Personal Dimensions
Developing Self-Efficacy, Adaptability, and Employability
Coupled with environmentally friendly goals, career adaptability (career concern, career control, career curiosity, and career confidence) remains a reliable psychological mechanism to promote sustainable development (*Curşeu et al., 2020). Enhancing micro-mastery (accomplishing substantial learning development in small, confident steps), future-oriented planning, social support, and sustainability help people succeed (*Gamberini & Pluchino, 2024) even when climatological economic shock waves unsettle career-life trajectories.
Constructing Meaning, Purpose, and Hope
The review revealed that people who situate career-life projects in stories of helping others and caring for the planet (Earth) report an enhanced sense of hope and perseverance. This finding supports the 2025 position paper's call to reorganise and redirect everyday practices ‘forms of life’ (Guichard, 2022) towards justice, inclusion, and sustainability.
Narrative Identity Work
Earliest recollections and challenges, role models, favourite media, and favourite stories continue to be regarded as powerful sources of information in narrative career counselling. Under the Counsellocene, however, career identity and self-identity include ecological identity (Kunchamboo et al., 2021) and interpersonal ethics (*Maree, 2024), enabling career counsellors to help people re-author stories that join personal meaning, hope, and fulfilment.
Mental Health and Wellbeing
Interpersonal responses to the disrupted biosphere include grief, eco-anxiety, and ethical-moral distress. Career counselling that mitigates these emotions offers people protection, advances kinship, and transforms (career) concern into focused action. In other words, caring for others and the planet boosts the psychological self, while eudaimonic fulfilment and personal wellbeing are also enhanced (Hickman, 2024; *Peiró et al., 2023).
The psychological theme or connecting thread is clear: internalised agency coupled with ethics promotes resilience. People thrive when they do something that matters to others and the planet.
Integrating Career Construction, Eco-Awareness, and Social Justice
The literature review synthesis proposes a framework (see Table 2) that interweaves different strands of theory, practice, research, and interventions: (i) self- and career construction and life design methods; (ii) the psychology of sustainability; (iii) explicit SDG integration; and (iv) context-sensitive digital supports. Its core commitments are care, responsibility, truth, hope, activity, and capability (the ethical import of the 2025 position paper) realised through narrative processes that end in action. The table shows the three connected domains of the Counsellocene perspective: Core Elements, Supporting Strategies, and Expected Outcomes.
Conceptual Framework: Counsellocene Perspective.
Flow: Core Elements → Supporting Strategies → Expected Outcomes
Thematic Map: Counsellocene Perspective
The thematic map locates the construct ‘sustainable and meaningful careers’ at the heart of the framework. Next, the construct “Counsellene” splits into five interconnected themes. The Counsellocene reframes counselling as co-authoring ‘sustainable forms of life’ and poses a different central question: instead of asking “Which job fits my traits?”, it asks “How shall I live and work so that my life contributes to a fair and sustainable society?” (Guichard, 2022). Methodologically, the quest is for two-way assessment, culturally grounded instruments, and advocacy for enabling structures. Conceptually, the emphasis is on Earth-system limits as borderline pre-conditions for counselling practice. Practically, career counsellors are positioned as educators, connectors, and policy discussers. The conceptual change is thus from personal to shared optimisation; in other words, designing lives that are consistent for the self and compassionate for the world.
Practical Implications for Career Counselling Practice, Policy, and Research
Career Counselling Practice
First, SDGs and eco-ethical reflection (*Suzanne et al., 2025) should be included in routine intake sessions to promote a holistic understanding of clients
Policy
First, career counselling development should be used to promote national sustainability agendas. Second, school-to-work career-life trajectories in green sectors should be promoted and expedited. Third, tertiary education and training institutions should track graduates’ civic-ecological roles. Third, equitable access to career counselling should be declared a national and international priority. Lastly, local and national policies should underwrite community-based counselling endeavours that value communal decision-making and informal economies.
Limitations of the Study
First, the research was conducted as a cross-sectional design and cannot establish the long-term impact of eco-awareness life design on identity, behaviour, and environmental engagement. Second, there remains a need for future longitudinal and mixed-method studies that use culturally sensitive, AI-assisted instruments to provide deeper and more sustained evidence. Third, the absence of comparative North–South and South–South research leaves unexplored the rich potential of indigenous practices that could powerfully inform global career counselling theory and practice.
Concluding Reflections
The literature review confirms a moment of change in career counselling. Current scholarship considers career choices, becoming employable, and transformation in the counselling field as key moral-ecological projects – rather than merely market alignment endeavours. The review endorses Manu's view (Manu, 2025) that it is imperative to replace counselling approaches that no longer offer an appropriate response to changing global occupational contexts and to update dated approaches. The two position papers (the 2009 Life Design Manifesto and the 2025 Anthropocene Reformulation), together with the 2024 fourth paradigm for careers in the twenty-first century (centred on sustainable development and discussed here), outline the field's evolution. The review synthesis further suggests how this new approach can be implemented in practice. Counsellors can now help people design active lives that are personally meaningful and demonstrably sustainable; lives that repair rather than replace. If we can achieve this goal, career counselling will show its indispensability to workers and their world.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
1. Tim Steward is thanked for his editing of the text.
2. The academic information specialist and the educational specialist are thanked for their support and for their understanding and patience.
3. Using Chat GPT (OpenAI, 11 December 2024 version) for language and word summary purposes is acknowledged. The author retains full responsibility for the intellectual content.
4. Articles marked with an were included in the systematic literature review.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.