Vocational Design for a Sustainable and Inclusive Future: The Role of Career Adaptability, Self-Determination, and Other Positive Dimensions

Dear colleagues,

Today, vocational guidance, career counseling, and life design have to consider that supporting clients to deal with the future means reflecting on how to face alarming risks. Some of these risks are, for example, increasing inequality, the concentration of prosperity and of job opportunities within an increasingly narrow band of people, the increasing movement of peoples across borders, the depletion of natural resources, the impact of technology on working environments and on quality of life, and job conditions that are at the same time more insecure and less decent.

Having considered all these factors, it is hard to avoid the fact that vocational guidance, career counseling, and life design need a change of pace that, according to us, can only be associated with investments in inclusion and sustainability. Vocational guidance and career counseling have to focus on new trajectories in order to manage the challenges that we are facing, working to promote the growth of the individuals and social development, ‘moving’ from a mainly individualistic view of growth and of people’s realization to a more markedly contextualistic view, focused on a representation of the future that involves high attention on the ‘social’, on the common good, and on sustainable development. In this respect, this Special Issue draws on the premise that effective vocational guidance and career counseling, also from the Life Design paradigm, could contribute to promoting an inclusive and sustainable development of society. Scholarly work can contribute to building inclusive and sustainable contexts: It is related to variables such as career adaptability, self-determination, resilience, and other positive resources.

This call for manuscripts is an invitation to career counseling theorists, researchers, and practitioners to share your views on how we should respond, individually and collectively, to the challenges discussed above. This Special Issue welcomes a variety of articles types, from empirical to theoretical studies.

Prof. Dr. Ilaria Di Maggio
Prof. Dr. Sara Santilli
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.