The first in a new series examining international careers, employability and skills systems, and what England might responsibly learn from them.
There is something slightly ironic about suggesting that England should look internationally for ideas about careers and employability, because we have done so before.
The Gatsby Benchmarks, now firmly embedded within England’s careers system, drew on extensive research from both the UK and internationally. It explored what high-quality, world-class career guidance looked like and, importantly, what lessons England could learn from elsewhere. Gatsby itself describes the original Good Career Guidance report as being based on international evidence.
Effective policy is rarely developed in a vacuum. Governments routinely draw on research, evaluation, and experience from different contexts to understand what works, why it works and how approaches might be adapted to their own circumstances. As Hulme (2005) notes, governments can look to draw “policy lessons” from international, transnational, and local governance structures. Looking internationally, therefore, should not be understood as a departure from England’s established approach to policy. Rather, it is consistent with a longstanding commitment to evidence-led policy development and implementation.
If looking outward has previously strengthened England’s careers infrastructure, there is a strong case for doing so again. The question is not whether England has valuable expertise of its own, but whether we are willing to learn from evidence and experience beyond our own borders and use that learning to improve what comes next.
Why does this matter for England?
England faces a set of interconnected challenges in the transition from education into employment. Young people becoming disengaged from education or work, the need to expand meaningful experiences of workplaces, and growing demand for skills are often treated as separate policy issues. In practice, they are closely connected.
The scale of the challenge is significant. Around six in ten young people who are NEET have never had a job, while nearly 57,000 16- and 17-year-olds in England are NEET. There is also substantial local variation in how effectively young people at risk of disengagement are identified and tracked. The Milburn Review’s interim report (2026) adds an important dimension: whether support reaches young people early enough to prevent disengagement becoming entrenched. This shifts the policy question beyond responding to NEET status towards earlier identification and intervention.
At the same time, policy is seeking to strengthen young people’s connection to the workplace. The Government has set an ambition for pupils to receive two weeks’ worth of work experience across Years 7 to 11. Delivering this at scale raises a practical question about employer capacity: how can the system provide more meaningful experiences without placing disproportionate demands on individual schools and businesses?
The skills challenge adds another dimension. Skills England projects that employment across 150 priority roles, spanning sectors including construction and health and social care, could grow by around 1.8 million by 2035, a 24% increase from 2025. The challenge is therefore not simply to develop more skills, but to connect young people’s education and training choices with changing labour-market demand.
These issues share a common thread: how effectively does the system help young people understand, access and navigate the transition from education into employment? Career development and guidance sit at the centre of this question. They cannot, on their own, reduce NEET levels, create employer capacity, or resolve skills shortages. But they can connect young people to the pathways, experiences, and labour-market information they need to make informed decisions.
This is where international comparison becomes useful. Other countries face many of the same pressures but have organised employer participation, career development, workplace learning and skills intelligence differently. Examining these approaches can help test the assumptions underpinning England’s current system and identify ideas that may be worth adapting. So, what might looking outward reveal?
What England can learn?
Singapore offers the clearest lesson in making that future more visible. Through SkillsFuture, it provides industry insights across more than 38 sectors, connecting job roles, career pathways and skills in demand.
Its Skills Frameworks are developed with employers, industry associations, unions, professional bodies and education and training providers, helping individuals, employers, careers professionals and training providers work from a common picture of jobs and skills. The strength is not simply that Singapore has good labour-market information. England does too. The connection is practical: each framework brings together sector trends, career pathways, job roles, the skills those roles require and relevant training programmes, giving people a clearer line of sight from labour-market change to the learning they need to progress. And the framework is only one part of how Singapore turns skills intelligence into action.
South Korea adds another dimension: responsiveness. Its National Competency Standards describe the knowledge, skills and attitudes required in industry across 1,096 detailed occupational categories. As AI changes work, Korea is using that infrastructure to respond. In 2026, its Ministry of Employment and Labor launched the K-Digital Training AI Campus, investing around 130 billion won annually to train approximately 10,000 AI specialists, with at least 30% of training based on real business problems. For England, the lesson is not to copy either system. It is that skills intelligence must become actionable, not simply accurate. A young person needs to understand what changing demand means for them, what skills they may need, and which pathways can take them there.
NEET: Maintain responsibility through the transition
The Netherlands is particularly interesting. Its NEET rate among 15–24-year-olds has remained below 5% since 2015 and stood at 3.6% in 2024. But the more useful lesson is the infrastructure beneath that figure. Youth-employment policy operates across national, regional and local levels, with 35 labour-market regions coordinating support alongside career guidance, vocational provision and employer engagement. The lesson is not one programme to import, but a system in which responsibility for young people’s transitions is deliberately organised.
Finland offers a complementary example. Its Ohjaamo network brings employment, education and training, housing, health and social support together through around 70 one-stop centres for people under 30. Instead of expecting young people to understand which organisation owns which part of their problem, services come together around them. OECD describes the early evidence as promising but still limited. For England, the principle worth exploring is : young people should not have to navigate fragmented systems precisely when they are most at risk of falling through them.
Experiences of workplaces: Build capacity collectively
Switzerland offers one important principle: spread the load. Around nine in ten Swiss upper-secondary VET learners follow dual-track apprenticeships, combining learning with employers, vocational schools and inter-company courses. More than 58,000 companies were training apprentices in 2020, and smaller or specialised businesses can share training responsibility where one employer cannot provide everything alone.
Germany operates on a related principle. Its 2026 register contains 324 recognised training occupations, while chambers and other competent bodies support and monitor in-company training, advise employers and oversee examinations. Inter-company provision can supplement what smaller or specialist businesses cannot provide themselves.
Neither country is a direct equivalent of England’s school-based Gatsby Benchmark 6, so the lesson is not to copy their apprenticeship systems. It is . If England needs substantially more meaningful experiences of workplaces, could Careers Hubs, sectors, chambers, employer bodies, combined authorities and business networks take greater collective responsibility for coordinating them? Could smaller employers pool opportunities rather than each being expected to solve the capacity challenge alone?
These six examples are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Future articles in this series will explore these challenges, and the countries best placed to inform them, in greater depth: asking not simply what appears to work elsewhere, but why, what would not transfer, and what England might responsibly adapt, test or rethink.
The limitations of policy transfer and comparison
Governments face legitimate pressure to respond quickly to problems and learn from countries that appear to achieve better outcomes. But rapid policy transfer can encourage policymakers to focus on the intervention rather than the wider conditions that made it possible (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). The risk is simple: copying the policy without reproducing the mechanism.
Before borrowing an international approach, policymakers need to understand the problem it was designed to address, the mechanism that appears to have produced the outcome, and the institutional and economic conditions that made it possible. They must then ask whether those conditions exist in England, what would need to change if they do not, what unintended consequences transfer might create, and whether the evidence is strong enough to distinguish correlation from causation.
This matters particularly when comparing headline outcomes. Differences between countries may reflect demographics, labour markets, welfare systems, definitions, and institutional histories rather than the policy itself. International evidence should therefore not be treated as a league table from which England can simply select winners. Its value lies in challenging assumptions, identifying mechanisms, and generating better policy questions.
England does not need to look overseas because other countries have solved the challenges of careers, employability, and the transition into work. It should look overseas because international comparison can help us ask better questions about how our own system works, where it is fragmented and what might be done differently.
The examples explored in this article point to a common theme: outcomes depend not simply on individual interventions, but on how effectively different parts of the system work together. The Netherlands and Finland raise questions about continuity and early intervention; Switzerland and Germany demonstrate how workplace learning can involve shared responsibility; and Singapore and South Korea illustrate how skills intelligence can be connected more directly to individual decision-making.
For England, this suggests that as careers education strengthens, workplace experiences expand, disengagement falls and skills needs evolve, the key question is not simply which policies to introduce, but whether the wider conditions are in place for them to work effectively. This should be an important test for future policy.
England already has significant strengths on which to build, including the Gatsby Benchmarks, established careers infrastructure, labour-market intelligence, and growing recognition of the importance of employer engagement. International evidence should complement these foundations rather than undermine them.
Ultimately, looking internationally is not about finding a ready-made answer. It is about widening the range of questions we are prepared to ask. If the next generation is to navigate increasingly complex transitions into employment, England will need a careers and skills system capable of connecting education, employers, labour market intelligence, and early intervention around the needs of the individual. International experience can help us understand what that might look like and what it would take to make it work here.
By Ladi Mohammed, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Global Educational Travel and Tours (GETT) and Shani Wijemuni, Policy Officer at Global Educational Travel & Tours (GETT)