In the fifth century BC, the Buddha left his home in search of answers to suffering of mortality, morbidity, and ignorance faced by humanity. Today in the twenty-first century, as humans we find ourselves grappling with the same questions. The increasing human displacements due to environmental crisis and conflicts in the last decade, growing precarity of employment, the refugee crisis, the recent pandemic, and war have forced us collectively as a human race to accept the certainty of two things: the reality of unpredictability and the human fragility in the face of it. These global shifts have also exposed the widening social and economic inequalities across lines of geography, ethnicity, race, gender, and ability, to name a few, and the adverse impact of these changes for the next generation and the generations to come.

The contemporary ever-changing working world has generated, on the one hand, precarious ways of living, instability, insecurity, and vulnerabilities; on the other hand, it has also created room for changes and innovations, producing opportunities for inviting new ways of being and fresh perspectives on social relationship forms and life designs. Significant changes in the working world are continuing to unfold, leading to an ongoing increase in the number of hybrid experiences, transitional situations, non-linear and open-wide careers, new vocational paths, and shifting career trajectories. These changes have rearranged not only the various dimensions of the living experiences but also processes and practices within the working context and educational settings.

Amid these seismic changes, the relevance and significance of Life Design interventions to enhance human capability as one response to the crisis cannot be overstated, since the living world has required career guidance reconstruction to face contemporary challenges. Research has shown that career guidance and counseling, lifelong learning, and life design interventions in addition to promoting access to decent work and decent life can address these concerns of human insecurity effectively.

In this context, the UniTwin international network “Life Designing Interventions (counseling, guidance, education) for decent work and sustainable development” promotes worldwide cooperation between universities on lifelong guidance and counseling to support decent work and sustainable development for all. This cooperation also develops and delivers programs to promote social inclusion by providing adapted/reconstructed intervention for disadvantaged, marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented groups.

This special section on Life design interventions (counseling, guidance, education) for decent work and sustainable development brings attention to varied research and field experiences in vocational guidance, career counseling, and life design interventions in different socio-economic and cultural contexts and across the life span that seek to promote a sense of well-being and access to decent work and a decent life for all. To attend to the contemporary demands of a rapidly shifting work-life landscape, the articles in this section highlight that culture and context matter and acknowledge the implications of these factors for career guidance and counseling principles, theories, and practices. Each article echoes the themes of applying a culturally and context-specific social justice lens, developing individual lives to live with dignity for and with others, focusing not only on the individual but also on the community, and including voices of those who are typically excluded from the discourse in the past.

The special section starts with a contribution of Jean Guichard that links Hannah Arendt’s ideas, Hans Jonas’ thoughts about imperative of responsibility, and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The author discusses how interventions for life- and career-construction can contribute to a development that is ecologically sustainable, socially just and based on decent work activities and concludes by proposing a shift “from career guidance to designing lives acting for fair and sustainable development.” In their article, In the same Boat? An online group career counseling with a group of young adults in the time of COVID-19, Sara Santilli and the other researchers from the University of Padova draw on a recent online career counseling intervention during COVID. They highlight the positive shift reflected in the adaptability, resilience, and future orientation among the young adults who participated in the study toward advancing an inclusive and sustainable future. Promoting access to decent work: career counselors’ experiences with career construction counseling in Norway, the article by Dalene brings attention to how career counselors can use Career Construction Counseling effectively to promote access to decent work across cultural contexts. Maree’s article titled, The outcomes of a mixed-methods, innovative group life design intervention with unemployed youths, is grounded in the work with unemployed youth in a developing country context. Maree applies the Maree Career Matrix and The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale to assess the efficacy of the intervention in expanding the career-life perspectives among the youth. In Wong’s article, Enhancing the career capabilities of NEET youth in Hong Kong: An experience-driven framework, the focus is on exploring the application of an experience-driven framework in enhancing the career capabilities among youth living with multiple vulnerabilities.

In their article titled Youth and children’s orchestras: analysis of the educational experience and some reflections from the field of lifelong guidance and counseling, Valenzuela and colleagues describe and discuss a socio-educational orchestra program experience of a group of socially vulnerable teenagers stressing that it promotes a better elaboration of future expectations and valued life paths, as well as facilitates students’ decent career construction through nonformal educational interventions. In the contribution, Guidance and education: Analysis of young peoples’ discontinuous school pathways: The guidance-oriented approach of educational institutions Gabriela Aisenson and colleagues presents the results of a study about the educational paths of unskilled workers in Argentina identifying the factors that had a negative impact on these paths. The article Decent work in Poland: A preliminary study. Suggestions for educational and counseling practice by Violetta Drabik-Podgórna and Marek Podgórna shares an analysis of how the notion of decent work is understood and conceptualized in the specific social, political, economic, and cultural Polish context. To conclude and grounded on the three guiding principles of social justice, decent work, and sustainable development, Emily Carosin and colleagues, in their article, a Developing lifelong guidance and counseling prospective by addressing individual and collective experience of humanness, humanity and the world identify spaces for social transformation that can build lifelong guidance knowledge and skills while fostering individual and collective identities.

Each article in the special section opens the space for discussion on new questions in the sustainable development debate around access to decent work and decent life for all, such as What do interventions in career counseling and education aim to achieve? Who benefits from them and who is left out? Which inequalities in access to resources can we observe in a given context, how are these inequalities problematic, and what are the personal, social or systemic factors driving them? How do we broaden the discourse to include individuals and groups that are not traditionally attended to in career guidance and counseling? What would it look like to expand the discussion to include individual and group development frameworks from different contexts? What strategies would promote the construction of decent work trajectories? In summary, what should be the role of career guidance and counseling in building fairer and more caring societies?

We hope that engaging with the articles and addressing these questions will provide researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with insights to develop innovative practices in Life Design interventions and reform policies to support a socially just sustainable development that would have much to contribute to the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development agenda of “transforming our world” (United Nations, 2015).