Chris Percy and I have just published a new article which looks at the idea of ‘return on investment (ROI)’ and seeks to explore what the state of the art is with respect to career guidance and a range of related fields.

In the article we argue that return on investment (ROI) has become part of the policymaking toolkit and that it is particularly pertinent for activities like school-based career guidance which are often deemed optional by some policymakers. There are institutions supporting ideal ROI methods alongside an academic critique, but little research on how ROI has been applied in practice in a guidance setting.

In this systematic review, we document 32 ROI studies across nine countries that address either school-based guidance or one of three congruent fields: widening participation in education, behaviour in schools and adult career guidance. We find the corpus highly heterogenous in methods and quality, leading to problems in comparability. We argue for a pragmatic approach to improving consistency and the importance of policymakers’ capacity for critically reading ROI studies.

While there are issues with the quality of the research reviewed, the evidence does at least provide some useful benchmarks for future ROIs. We find the following range of ROIs for each of the areas studied.

• School based career guidance. Returns = 0.7x – 61.5x investmet
• Career guidance for adults = 0.9x-109.6x
• Widening participation = 0.6x-43x
• Behaviour interventions in schools = -0.5x – 104.9x

We go on to explore further implications for future studies.

Read Lessons for career guidance from return-on-investment analyses in complex education-related fields (Open access)