OECD: CAREER READINESS DASHBOARD

The OECD with the support of Education and Employers and Amazon has developed a Dashboard that graphically presents the results of the OECD 2022 survey of career thinking and career learning activity of young people, undertaken as a module of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) programme with 15 years-old students. The PISA assesses students’ capacities for literacy, mathematics, and science, using ‘real-life’ tasks.

The PISA career readiness module assessed teenagers’

-Occupational expectations

-Alignment of these expectations with actual national labour market demand

-Engagement in career learning activities (work experience, work shadowing etc.)

-Career thinking (certainty about occupational expectations)

-Career attitudes (self-thoughts and the influences of school, family, and socioeconomic circumstances)

The data points provided are linked to predictors of better employment outcomes for teenagers as found in longitudinal studies: https://issuu.com/oecd.publishing/docs/how-youth-explore-experience-think-about-their-fut

The results are presented by country and differentiated by gender and socioeconomic status.

A helpful set of literature references is provided at the end of the Dashboard.

The Dashboard is very useful for national researchers in examining the provision and implementation of career learning policies and programmes, both formal and informal, in their own national education and training systems. They can also be applied to school/institutional evaluation of career learning programmes.

While the Dashboard data is provided for the 80 countries (including just one from the continent of Africa) that were interested in and could afford to take part in the careers module of PISA programme, the career readiness survey questions can effectively be employed by researchers and policymakers in countries that did not participate in PISA.

International comparative studies based on the data will be affected by the differences in the national education and training systems and curricula. The snapshot of the career learning activities of students aged 15-16 may not appropriately reflect what happens in countries where career learning activities in the education system are targeted at the 16 to 18 years age bracket.

Finally, the Dashboard would really benefit from a set of guidelines (or a link to a set of guidelines) to enable national/regional policymakers draw policy conclusions from the data provided.

For more information, contact: career.readiness@oecd.org

September 26, 2025 / North America, Europe, Assessing effectiveness, Career management skills, Systems and Institutional Evaluation Reports, South and Central America, Asia, Schools, OECD, South Pacific, Country Policy and Systems Reviews, ICCDPP Blog, Comparative Country Reports and Studies, Guides and Resources for Policy Makers and Delivery Managers