Across Europe, young people and older adults are experiencing lengthy and increasingly complex transitions to the workplace, building and changing careers. Guidance interventions aim to help them navigate their trajectories through education, life, and work, in processes that reflect the deep integration between the public and the private, the individual and social, the emotional and the cognitive. Career guidance has attracted high levels of international and national policy attention, in what Sultana (2022) calls ‘policy busyness’ to respond to expected (lifelong) transitions of individuals to a knowledge-based economy. Such policies often draw on concerns around mismatches between people’s education and training choices and the needs of the labour market, as well as assumptions about the young people’s knowledge of career alternatives. National-level policies often design career guidance that aims to address social justice concerns but, instead, end up pursuing liberal models of guidance that responsibilize the individual, or allow large scope for interpretation and local implementations that end up exacerbating inequalities between regions and schools. This collection consists of articles attempting to redress gaps in research knowledge around governance of career guidance in comparative studies that map the field and generate theorized accounts of systems and their effects.