According to a landmark review published today, AI is beginning to shape young people’s transitions from education to work at a time when they face heightened challenges. While AI tools may offer opportunities for better access to personalised information and employment, they also pose risks including around data privacy, wellbeing and increased inequalities.
The report, ‘Navigating the future: a landscape review of AI in career guidance for young people’, jointly published by the Nuffield Foundation and the Ada Lovelace Institute, is the first in-depth exploration of AI in UK career guidance, across secondary, further and higher education and into work. The collaboration brings together Nuffield Foundation’s deep expertise in education and youth transitions and the Ada Lovelace Institute’s focus on the relationship between AI and data-driven technologies and the impact on the people affected by them.
Young people are currently negotiating heightened challenges in the transition from education to work. Competition for jobs is high due to reduced opportunities and AI tools making it easier to apply for roles. Rising levels of economic inactivity reflect growing and circumstantial challenges faced by young people and graduate employment opportunities are contracting.
AI systems have been used for decades for matching individuals with career pathways and jobs, and for labour market analysis. But there has been a surge of interest among careers practitioners in the potential for newer foundation models to improve access to personalised information, advice and guidance.
The review describes how AI is being used with the intent of improving access to careers information, offering a hybrid chatbot/human approach to careers advice and guidance, supporting equity and inclusion, increasing efficiency for career practitioners and widening access to employment. Young people are also using easily accessible AI models or large language models such as ChatGPT for career exploration which risks ill-informed career decision-making based on biased and inaccurate data and threats to data privacy and safeguarding.
The review aims to deepen understanding of the opportunities and risks of AI in career guidance and to support AI developers, policy and education experts to navigate these issues. It emphasises the importance of taking a purpose-led approach, supporting the workforce to adapt, and building evaluation evidence, highlighting priorities for further research.
Dr Emily Tanner, lead author and Education Programme Head at the Nuffield Foundation said:
“As we explore the potential of AI for careers support, we must keep a keen eye on equity and ensure young people most in need have access to the highest quality information, advice and guidance. Better evidence is required to determine what role AI should play and new work funded by the Nuffield Foundation is underway to build sector consensus about what good practice looks like.”
Alongside a literature review, 22 organisations were consulted to inform the report, spanning career development practitioners, educators, employers, technologists and policy officials.
Some of the recommendations from the report include:
- Policymakers should invest in careers infrastructure to ensure education providers can give every young person access to personal guidance from a human professional in addition to appropriate digital support.
- AI developers should build with ‘safety by design’ at the core of their products and engage with end users and research to understand how young people use Large Language Models (LLM) chatbots and the guardrails needed to ensure safety. They should also develop and test products to support young people with different special educational needs and disabilities.
- Career development practitioners should target professional (human) careers support at students from disadvantaged backgrounds and ask digital providers for evidence of effectiveness and details on how models work to inform procurement decisions.
- Education leaders should provide clear AI policies to careers advisers working with young people.
- Employers should ensure any use of AI in recruitment processes promotes inclusion and fairness.
- Researchers and funders should investigate the effectiveness of different hybrid models of chatbot- and human-led guidance for different use cases. Research should also explore how to design and implement hybrid models inclusively and to reduce the inequalities in access to guidance.
