The path is not the journey

When we talk about career pathways, what are we talking about, exactly?

The phrase passes easily through policy documents, school improvement plans and careers meetings, apparently naming something that everyone already understands. We identify career pathways, explain them, choose between them and help young people progress along them. The language feels descriptive, as though the pathways are already there and our task is simply to help young people find them.

But there is almost nothing literal in career pathway. A career is not a physical course along which somebody moves and a pathway is not a track beneath their feet. Both words conceptualise something abstract through movement. Put them together and a landscape appears in which careers can have routes, directions, junctions and destinations.

For the career development practitioner, there is nothing particularly troubling about that. Metaphor is not simply an interesting feature of careers language; it is a professional tool. Career theorists Kerr Inkson and Norman Amundson have explored both the benefits and dangers of metaphorical thinking in careers work, including the value of working with multiple metaphors rather than allowing one to dominate.[1] In guidance, practitioners can create and work with metaphors to help clients articulate experiences, possibilities and uncertainties that may otherwise be difficult to express. A metaphor can be explored, tested, extended or abandoned according to whether it remains useful to the person whose career is being discussed.

The important point is that the metaphor works for the client.

If someone experiences their career as a crossroads, a practitioner can explore the crossroads with them. If another metaphor makes better sense of their experience, the conversation can move there instead. The metaphor is useful precisely because it remains provisional. Neither practitioner nor client needs to believe that the crossroads actually exists.

Career pathway is different in one important respect. The metaphor is often already there.

The young person encounters pathways in institutional language before any guidance conversation begins. Schools identify them, qualifications are organised into them, progression is described through them and destinations appear at their ends. The practitioner and client are therefore not necessarily creating a metaphor through which the young person can explore their experience. They may already be standing inside one that the institution has constructed for them.

That does not make pathway a bad metaphor. It makes its dominance worth exploring.

And there is a further complication. Career pathway no longer sounds particularly metaphorical. Both of its constituent metaphors are largely conventional — what we often describe as dead metaphors.[2] We do not normally hear career as physical movement or pathway as a strip of ground worn by repeated passage. The metaphor has become so familiar that we barely notice it as metaphor at all.

Dead metaphors lurk in the shadows of language. The metaphor may have disappeared from view, but some of the semantic associations accumulated around it can retain their weight. The metaphor does not lose its gravity when it dies. It loses its light. We may not consciously picture a physical path when we say career pathway, but direction, progress, guidance, deviation and destination remain conceptually close at hand.

The practitioner-created metaphor is visible enough to be questioned: Does this still work for you? The dead institutional metaphor is harder to interrogate because it presents itself as though there were nothing metaphorical to interrogate.

That is the problem I want to explore.

What happens when one useful metaphor becomes so familiar, and so embedded in institutional practice, that it begins to organise how we understand the thing it was originally helping us to describe?

A path comes from the past

Words arrive carrying the accumulated weight of everywhere they have been before. We do not need to know that history to feel its pull.

The oldest recorded senses of path describe a track formed by the repeated passage of people or animals rather than something deliberately planned and constructed.[3] The path, in this older sense, contains evidence that somebody has been this way before. That is precisely what makes paths useful. Other travellers have encountered the terrain. Their passage has left information behind. The dangerous ground may be known. The difficult crossing may have been identified. We do not have to rediscover everything for ourselves.

There is wisdom in following paths. Previous journeys can provide evidence about the terrain. The difficulty begins when knowledge derived from those journeys is projected forwards, as though what has been travelled can also tell us the shape of what has not.

Whatever knowledge the path offers about previous passage necessarily comes from the past. Yet young people are preparing for the future.

We know that particular qualifications have historically enabled access to particular courses. We know current entry requirements. We have labour-market information, destination data and the accumulated experience of people who have travelled before. All of that is valuable.

None of it is a map of the future.

A fourteen-year-old making decisions now may still be working in the 2070s. We cannot know what occupations will exist, how industries will change, what technologies will emerge, what economic shocks will occur, whom that young person will meet, what they will discover about themselves or what will eventually matter to them.

Uncertainty here is not simply a temporary absence of information that better careers education can eliminate. Some uncertainty belongs to the future because the future has not yet happened.

The pathway metaphor can conceal that distinction. It presents possibility as geography. As space rather than time. A possible future becomes a route; a route becomes something that can be followed; and something that can be followed can be departed from.

Before long, the explorer is deviant.

The pathway does not make the future more predictable. It makes it easier to imagine that it is.

A map of tomorrow

In the late 80s, I cycled from Leicester to Andalucia. Michelin road maps helped me plot the route.

I kept those maps for years. They were expensive, and I imagined that I might use them again. Eventually I threw them away, not because the journey had ceased to matter, but because the maps had ceased to be useful as maps. Roads had changed. Information had changed. Technology had changed.

If one of my children decided to make the same journey now, I would have things worth telling them. I could talk about places I loved, roads I hated, mistakes I made, unexpected encounters, getting lost and what I might do differently.

I would not hand them a set of old Michelin maps and expect them to follow the route.

This illustrates something important about careers education. Previous journeys are extraordinarily valuable evidence. They can tell young people what other people encountered and what happened when particular choices were made. They can identify known requirements and foreseeable consequences.

But experience and map are not the same thing. The experience can remain valuable long after the map has expired.

Perhaps one of our responsibilities as adults is therefore to pass on the experience while being much more careful about passing on the map.

Career before careers

If pathway gives us a particular conception of movement through a career, we also need to ask what kind of thing we imagine is moving along it. The problem may not lie only in the route. It may also lie in the conception of career that makes the route appear natural.

There is another dead metaphor here.

Career itself once carried much more obvious movement. Its history lies in ideas of a course or road and, further back, wheeled movement: the word came into English through French carrière, meaning a road or racecourse, ultimately from Latin carrus, a wheeled vehicle or chariot.[4] The older physical sense remains visible when we say that something is careering down a hill.

That history does not determine what career means now. To claim otherwise would be to commit the very mistake this essay is trying to avoid: treating semantic inheritance as destiny. But it does reveal some of the conceptual material the word has carried with it.

Physical movement has largely disappeared from modern usage, but the idea of movement remains. It has shifted from movement through space to movement through time. What will you do? What will you become? Where will this lead? Within a conventional conception of career, young people start thinking about careers in school, but the career itself appears to begin where school ends.

Career theory has itself moved considerably beyond that narrow boundary.

Donald Super’s life-span, life-space account conceptualised career as the combination and sequence of roles occupied across a lifetime, explicitly including the roles of child and pupil or student alongside those associated with employment.[5] Later constructionist and narrative approaches, particularly the work of Mark Savickas, have placed still greater emphasis on the ways people construct career through experience, interpretation, agency and the stories through which they make sense of their lives.[6]

Seen through those lenses, a career is not simply the sequence of jobs someone eventually accumulates. It is constructed through experience: education, relationships, opportunities, constraints, decisions, successes, failures, chance encounters, changing values and changing circumstances.

Careers education cannot then be confined neatly to the moments explicitly labelled careers.

The teacher who notices an ability a child has not recognised may affect their career. So may the subject they unexpectedly love, the production they join, the responsibility they are trusted with, the trip that changes what they imagine, the work-experience placement they hate, the friendship that changes their ambitions, or the experience of finally belonging somewhere.

The child’s career was not simply waiting somewhere in the future for them to reach it. Some of the experiences through which they will later understand and construct it were already happening.

That matters because the pathway metaphor directs attention towards what lies ahead. A broader conception of career asks us also to notice what is being constructed through experience now.

If career is partly constructed through accumulating and interpreting experience, the purpose of careers education cannot simply be to help young people identify available routes. It must also include increasing the range of experiences, knowledge, relationships and possibilities from which they can construct what comes next.

Perhaps, then, the pathway is not simply describing career incompletely. Its orientation towards the future may be obscuring aspects of career that cannot be found by looking ahead.

The right path

Let’s make our way back to the path.

Paths do not simply have directions. They can be right or wrong. We find the right path and take the wrong one. We lose our way, go astray, become wayward or misguided. We follow the straight and narrow. We deviate.

That moral inheritance does not have to be consciously understood to make those relationships readily available.

Metaphors have mass. We experience their gravity long before we feel their weight.[7]

This deserves particular attention in careers education because guidance takes place during a period in which young people are increasingly negotiating autonomy, identity and ownership of decisions about their future. The issue is not simply that adolescents dislike routes suggested by adults. It is that careers education operates at precisely the point when the relationship between adult knowledge and young-person agency matters.

For an adult, the well-trodden path can signify reassurance. Somebody has done this before. We know roughly where it goes. We have evidence that it can work. For a young person, the same qualities can also communicate something else: other people have already decided where this goes. The route has already been travelled. The destination is already intelligible to the adults around me.

Every established path, however, was once unmade. Somebody went first. Every safe, well-signposted pathway we confidently recommend exists because somebody once travelled without it.

The problem is not that established routes are inherently undesirable. Many are excellent. The problem arises when established begins to acquire the moral weight of the establishment, and exploration begins to look like deviation.

The pathway metaphor does not cause us to condemn exploration. It does, however, provide a conceptual vocabulary in which leaving the established route can very easily be understood that way.

The keeper of the map

Once career has been given a pathway, expertise begins to look like knowledge of the terrain. And pretty soon, the expert is the one with the map. The leader becomes the guide who can read it.

All of this makes perfect sense within the conceptual landscape. These are familiar words in careers work: leader, guidance, direction. Expose the metaphor and they begin to look rather less neutral.

A school leader asks: What are the routes? What are the next steps? Where does this qualification lead? Is this pupil on track? What is the appropriate pathway?

The professionally sophisticated careers practitioner may actually be expert because they are less certain than the metaphor allows them to sound.

They can explain qualification requirements, current opportunities, reliable labour-market information, established routes and foreseeable consequences. But they may also understand happenstance, changing labour markets, identity, agency and the limits of prediction. They know that information can improve a decision without transforming the future into a known landscape.

This distinction matters. Knowledge of current conditions and previous routes is not the same thing as knowledge of an individual’s future.

Yet the adviser who confidently says, “Take X and it will lead to Y,” may sound more expert than the adviser who says, “Y is one possibility; here is the evidence, here are the alternatives, here are the consequences we can reasonably foresee, and here is what we cannot know.”

Certainty can masquerade as expertise because the metaphor has already promised certainty on the professional’s behalf.

The careers professional is being asked to fulfil a promise made by the metaphor.

There is an irony here. At the level of individual guidance, skilled practice may involve creating a metaphor with a client precisely to open up thinking, surface assumptions and make uncertainty discussable. At institutional level, the practitioner may instead find themselves working inside a metaphor whose assumptions have already been fixed.

The professional task can therefore become partly one of resistance: retaining the flexibility of the guidance conversation inside a system that would prefer the map to be settled.

Schools make this particularly difficult because uncertainty is operationally inconvenient. Schools work through timetables, curricula, deadlines, interventions, qualifications, targets and measurable outcomes. We don’t know is difficult to put on an improvement plan.

Yet acknowledging uncertainty is not professional incompetence. Sometimes it is the most ethical thing a professional can do.

Impartiality on unequal ground

If the pathway metaphor encourages us to imagine that an appropriate route can be identified, and if the careers professional is positioned as someone with specialist knowledge of those routes, then impartiality becomes more complicated.

Schools, colleges, universities, parents, employers and governments all have legitimate interests in what young people do next. Those interests do not necessarily coincide. A school sixth form may want retention. A university wants students. An employer needs labour. Government has priorities for skills and economic growth. Parents have hopes. Young people have aspirations that may themselves be uncertain, contradictory or changing.

Inside the pathway metaphor, the ethical question can easily become: Which is the right path?

But right for whom?

That question has a particular contemporary resonance. Current statutory guidance in England requires schools, colleges and independent training providers to ensure that young people have the careers education, information and guidance needed to follow “a pathway that is right for them and aligns with employment opportunities”.[8] Both parts of that formulation are entirely defensible. Their juxtaposition nevertheless captures the tension rather neatly. What is right for the young person must somehow coexist with what is required by the labour market.

The difficulty with impartiality goes deeper than the guidance conversation. Children have been on pathways in school long before they meet a career guidance professional. Journeys, pathways, next steps and destinations appear on classroom walls, corridor displays, electronic screens and school websites. Teachers use them. Visiting speakers use them. Parents encounter them at parents’ evenings. Progress is tracked, transitions are managed and young people are repeatedly located somewhere between a starting point and somewhere they are expected to reach.

The pathway is therefore not simply one careers metaphor among several. It is embedded in the conceptual architecture of the institution within which careers education and guidance take place.

That creates a peculiar problem for impartiality. The Career Development Institute’s Code of Ethics explicitly requires practitioners to remain aware of limitations on their impartiality and to adopt a neutral, non-directive and client-centred approach.[9] The problem I am describing is not a failure of careers professionals to understand that responsibility.

A skilled practitioner can make the metaphor explicit. They can question it, expose its limitations and introduce other metaphors through which a young person might understand career. Career might be constructed, improvised or narrated. It might involve growth, exploration or happenstance. In the guidance conversation these alternatives can be explored and tested according to whether they help the young person make sense of their experience.

But they do not enter the conversation on equal terms.

The alternatives still behave recognisably as metaphors. The pathway increasingly does not. Education has given it material form. There are pathways to choose, progression routes to follow, next steps to complete and destinations to record. The institution has built systems around relationships that the metaphor originally made conceptually available. What began as a way of understanding educational and career development can therefore appear to the young person as simply the way educational and career development is.

The guidance professional can explain that a pathway is a metaphor. The institution surrounding the conversation appears to insist that it is a thing.

That matters because metaphors need conceptual space in which to work. If one metaphor has become sufficiently embedded in the language, practices and structures of an institution, alternatives have to establish themselves in territory that has already been organised around its assumptions. Improvisation must compete with progression frameworks. Happenstance must compete with planned destinations. Construction and narrative must compete with routes already printed on the map.

The ground is no longer neutral.

This is a more profound challenge to impartiality than the possibility that an individual practitioner might favour one destination over another. The practitioner may be scrupulously impartial. They may explicitly acknowledge uncertainty and resist any suggestion that they can know a young person’s unlived future. They may introduce alternative metaphors precisely to open up possibilities rather than close them down. Yet they are doing so inside an institution whose conceptual architecture has already given one metaphor an extraordinary advantage.

The pathway has acquired sufficient conceptual gravity to make other ways of conceptualising career more difficult to sustain. Its dominance does not prevent alternative metaphors from being imagined, but it changes the conditions under which they must survive. One metaphor has become part of the architecture. The others remain visitors.

Perhaps, then, the deepest challenge to impartiality lies not in ensuring neutrality between the available pathways. It lies in recognising that the pathway itself is not neutral conceptual territory.

When metaphor becomes infrastructure

The pathway, then, is no longer merely a metaphor used to talk about careers. Parts of the educational system have been organised within the conceptual territory it helped to create.

That requires a careful distinction. The metaphor did not create educational reality from nothing. Sequential qualifications, entry requirements, transitions and labour-market structures exist independently of the words we use for them. Schools have legitimate reasons to monitor progress and to find out what happens to young people after they leave.

The stronger claim is that metaphor selects and connects particular features of reality. Path makes direction intelligible. Direction makes progress possible. Progress requires movement towards something. Movement can be guided and measured. Departure can be identified. Eventually there is a destination.

These concepts form an ecology. Each becomes more intelligible in the presence of the others, and repeated use strengthens the relationships between them. Once institutions begin to organise practice within that conceptual territory, the metaphor becomes operational.

Something important then happens. Operationalisation can create a feedback loop. The systems built within the metaphorical landscape make that landscape appear increasingly objective. We can point to the pathway because we created one. We can demonstrate progress because we decided what counted as forward. We can identify deviation because we constructed a route against which deviation could be measured.

The metaphor helps construct the concept. The concept makes particular practices intelligible. Practice gives the concept material form. That material form can then appear to confirm the metaphor.

What began as one way of understanding the world has become part of the world we are trying to understand.

This may explain why the pathway no longer competes on equal terms with other metaphors for career. Its advantage is not simply familiarity. It has acquired material evidence of its own apparent reality. Improvisation remains recognisably metaphorical. Narrative can be offered as a way of thinking. Construction can illuminate something different.

But pathway can point to pathways.

This is where conceptual gravity can become what I will call conceptual foreclosure: one metaphor becomes sufficiently dominant that alternative ways of conceptualising the same phenomenon become progressively more difficult to sustain.[10]

The problem is not that pathway is an imperfect metaphor. Every metaphor is imperfect. The problem begins when one partial metaphor becomes so conceptually powerful, and so materially embedded, that its partiality becomes difficult to see.

At that point it does not merely shape the answers we give. It begins to shape the questions we find natural to ask.

Which pathway is right? Where does it lead? What are the next steps? Is the young person making progress? Are they on track? What guidance do they need? What is their destination?

These are reasonable questions within the conceptual territory.

But the conceptual territory made those questions particularly available.

What other questions became harder to ask once we built our systems there?

Testing the metaphor

If pathway has genuinely become more than a convenient expression, we should be able to detect its entailments in what institutions find natural to value, measure and record.

Three ideas have repeatedly appeared in the conceptual landscape we have been exploring: progress, destination and being on track.

They ask three subtly different questions. Are you moving forwards? Where have you arrived? Are you where you are supposed to be?

None of those questions is inherently unreasonable. Together, however, they allow us to test what happens when the pathway moves from metaphor into institutional practice.

Progress

Among cyclists there is a joke that if it is not on Strava, it did not happen. It captures something recognisable about data: what can be recorded begins to acquire a peculiar advantage over what cannot.

Schools know this very well. Attendance can be measured. Progress can be measured. Behaviour incidents can be counted. Qualifications can be recorded. Destinations can be coded. Groups can be compared and gaps displayed on dashboards.

The data can be extremely useful, but the measurable and the meaningful are not identical. Attendance is not belonging. A qualification is not confidence. A completed work-experience placement does not capture the moment a young person discovers that adults outside school value something they can do. A recorded destination tells us remarkably little about whether somebody has found purpose.

The pathway metaphor makes directional movement particularly intelligible. If there is a route, there can be progress along it. If there is progress, there must be some means of deciding what counts as forwards. Once that decision has been made, progress can potentially be measured.

This does not make the measurement meaningless. It makes the prior conceptual decision important. Before we can measure how far somebody has progressed, we have to decide what movement in the right direction looks like.

The future remains uncertain, but the screen looks reassuringly precise.

Destination

Destination reveals a different entailment. A destination implies arrival, but what exactly has a sixteen-year-old arrived at?

Schools have good reasons to know what happens to young people when they leave. Whether somebody moves into education, employment or training matters, and patterns in destination data can reveal inequalities and weaknesses that institutions need to understand.

But the metaphor gives the administrative category additional conceptual weight. Year 11 finishes. An application is made. An offer is received. Enrolment is confirmed. A destination is recorded. The young person has apparently arrived somewhere.

Of course, they have done nothing of the sort in the larger sense implied by the word. They have changed institution, course or status. Their career has not reached a destination. Indeed, if career is understood partly through the experiences from which people subsequently construct meaning, this new setting is itself another place from which that construction continues.

A recorded destination can also conceal the quality of what happens after arrival. Somebody can be enrolled without belonging, employed without flourishing, or studying something they will soon abandon. The administrative fact may be entirely accurate while remaining remarkably thin as an account of the young person’s experience.

The problem is not that destination data are worthless. They answer an important institutional question. The conceptual danger lies in allowing an administratively useful stopping point to acquire the semantic weight of arrival.

On track

On track tightens the pathway metaphor.

A path suggests direction, but it still allows considerable freedom to the traveller. You can stop, wander, leave it, return to it or explore what lies beside it. A track defines a more prescribed course against which movement can be judged.

In one of its most familiar senses, a track belongs to a railway, and with that sense come trains, stations, departure times and timetables. Routes have been laid down in advance, journeys are expected to happen at particular times and arrival can be measured against a schedule.

This is remarkably close to the temporal architecture of schooling. Young people move through year groups together. Courses have prescribed lengths. Applications have deadlines. Examinations happen at fixed points. Transitions are scheduled. There are times at which particular decisions are expected and points by which particular forms of progress should have been made.

To be on track, then, is not simply to be moving in an accepted direction. It is to be where the system expects you to be by now.

Once somebody can be on track, they can also be off track, behind or in need of intervention. Stopping becomes delay. Wandering becomes deviation. Missing one transition can resemble missing a connection. Yet a journey is not only what happens at its destination. Stopping, wandering and changing direction may be part of the experience through which somebody discovers what matters to them.

There is another linguistic shift hiding in plain sight. Schools do not merely ask whether young people are on track. They track them. Progress is recorded against expectations, trajectories are projected and interventions follow when actual movement diverges from the anticipated course.

The metaphor has moved almost imperceptibly from describing the traveller to describing what the institution does to the traveller.

There are good reasons for schools to notice when young people are struggling or when their attainment is falling below reasonable expectations. The point is not that tracking is inherently wrong. It is that the conceptual architecture makes particular questions exceptionally easy to ask.

Are you making progress?

Where is your destination?

Are you on the right track, and are you where you should be by now?

The questions make perfect sense within the system we have constructed. But each contains assumptions that the familiarity of the language makes difficult to see: that development has a forward direction, that meaningful points of arrival can be identified, that an anticipated course exists and that movement can be judged against its timetable.

Perhaps we need to mix our metaphors

The obvious response is to find a better metaphor.

Perhaps career is navigation. Or exploration. Perhaps it is construction, improvisation, growth, an ecosystem, a horizon or a repertoire.

Each illuminates something the pathway obscures. Each also brings its own baggage.

Consider the apparently humane idea that a child is a seed. It directs our attention towards growth, nurture, environment and flourishing. It reminds us that development cannot simply be commanded and that poor conditions can inhibit what a young person is able to do.

But operationalise the metaphor and questions quickly appear. What constitutes healthy growth? What is this seed capable of becoming? How do we know whether its potential is being realised?

At institutional scale, something more revealing happens.

The seed becomes a crop.

The relationship between the institution and the seed changes with it. A seed might be nurtured for what it becomes. A crop is cultivated for a purpose. Growth becomes yield. Variation becomes something to manage. The institution becomes interested not simply in whether each individual flourishes, but in what the population will produce and whether that production will meet anticipated need.

The apparently child-centred question How can we help every seed flourish? can slide towards a very different one: How do we cultivate the crop we will need?

Careers education then sits uncomfortably between individual flourishing and economic demand.

Or consider chasing rainbows. It seems almost the opposite of a pathway: personal, aspirational, colourful and unconstrained by a pre-existing route. Yet once an institution tries to operationalise it, young people need identified rainbows. Aspiration must be assessed. Progress towards the rainbow must be demonstrated. Milestones appear.

Eventually the institution constructs a pathway to the rainbow.

These are thought experiments, not evidence that schools would literally behave this way. Their purpose is to expose the mechanism. Operationalisation does not simply make a metaphor concrete. Institutional requirements can select and amplify those parts of a metaphor that can be planned, delivered, monitored and measured. In doing so, the institution may begin to transform the metaphor itself.

The individual seed becomes the institutional crop. The personal rainbow acquires milestones. Possibility becomes progression.

Searching for the correct replacement metaphor may therefore reproduce the original problem.

No metaphor can carry the entire conceptual weight of something as complex as a human career. Every metaphor makes particular relationships visible while making others less obvious. Path foregrounds direction and sequence. Seed foregrounds development and environment. Rainbow foregrounds aspiration and possibility. Improvisation might foreground responsiveness and uncertainty. Repertoire might foreground accumulation and available responses.

None deserves sovereignty.

Perhaps healthy institutions should therefore consciously mix their metaphors. As a former English teacher, that isn’t an easy conclusion to draw.

In writing, mixing metaphors is usually treated as a mistake. Conceptually, it may be a safeguard. It is also closer to what skilled guidance already does. Inkson and Amundson’s argument for “multiple metaphor” in careers thinking provides an established professional and theoretical precedent for precisely this refusal to allow one metaphor to carry the entire conceptual burden.[1]

The practitioner does not need one metaphor capable of explaining a client’s entire career. A metaphor can be useful for as long as it helps the person think, and another can become useful when the question changes.

A school might use the path when previous journeys genuinely provide useful evidence. It might think about seeds when considering the conditions in which a young person can flourish. It might think about horizons when asking what possibilities are currently visible. It might think about improvisation when preparing young people for circumstances nobody can predict.

The purpose is not to construct a more elaborate master metaphor from all of them. It is precisely the opposite.

Each metaphor should be allowed to disturb the others.

The path reminds the improviser that some things are known. Improvisation reminds the pathfinder that not everything can be mapped. The seed makes us attend to conditions. The horizon reminds us that possibilities can change when position changes.

Metaphorical plurality makes the partiality of each metaphor easier to see. More importantly, it restores something that individual guidance practice already understands: the metaphor should remain responsive to the person, rather than requiring the person to become intelligible through the metaphor.

The alternative might be described — provisionally, because this is another metaphor — as a kind of conceptual monoculture. One metaphor becomes so successful that the institution begins to reproduce the assumptions contained within it. Its vocabulary becomes professional vocabulary. Its relationships become frameworks. Its entailments become measures. Its measures become systems. Eventually the systems themselves provide apparent confirmation of the metaphor.

Perhaps conceptual ecologies, like natural ones, benefit from diversity.

But that metaphor, too, should be allowed to remain a metaphor.

The conclusion is not that education should stop talking about pathways.

Pathways are useful. Previous journeys matter. Established routes matter. Qualifications have real requirements. Labour markets contain real constraints. Young people deserve accurate information about all of them.

The problem begins when a useful metaphor acquires conceptual sovereignty.

Every metaphor is partial. Each allows us to see some relationships more clearly by directing attention away from others. When institutions repeatedly organise language, practice and measurement around one of them, that partiality can become increasingly difficult to recognise. The resulting systems can then make the metaphor appear less like one possible way of understanding reality and more like reality itself.

Replacing pathway with another master metaphor would not solve that problem. It would merely move the centre of gravity.

Perhaps the more important institutional discipline is therefore to keep our metaphors visible, provisional and plural.

In one-to-one guidance, that principle is intensely practical. We can create a metaphor because it helps this person make sense of something now. We can explore it with them, test where it leads, notice where it stops working and replace it when another way of thinking becomes more useful. The metaphor remains the servant of the conversation.

Perhaps institutions need some of the same humility.

The question for a healthy school is not:

What is our metaphor for career?

It is:

Which metaphor are we using to think about career right now, what does it allow us to see, and what might it be preventing us from seeing?

That question allows us to use the path without mistaking it for the landscape. We can value previous journeys without treating them as maps of tomorrow. We can provide guidance without pretending to know an unlived future. We can cultivate potential without deciding in advance what a young person ought to become. We can encourage aspiration without turning somebody else’s life into our preferred destination.

The pathway can then return to a more modest and useful role. It is one way of thinking about known routes through parts of a career landscape. It can describe requirements, sequences and possibilities for which we have evidence. It cannot represent the totality of a future that has not happened or a career that is being actively constructed through experience.

Perhaps the purpose of careers education is not to keep young people on the right path.

It is to enlarge what they can know, experience, imagine and do; to give them the benefit of journeys made before without pretending those journeys reveal the road ahead; and to develop their capacity to respond intelligently when our knowledge runs out.

The path can be useful.

But the path is not the journey.

And metaphors have consequences.

Notes and references

[1] Inkson, K. & Amundson, N. E. (2002), ‘Career metaphors and their application in theory and counseling practice’, Journal of Employment Counseling, 39(3), 98–108. The authors examine the benefits and dangers of metaphorical thinking in careers theory and counselling, advocate the use of “multiple metaphor”, and consider the deliberate facilitation of metaphor in career counselling. DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1920.2002.tb00841.x.

[2] I use dead metaphor here in the familiar rhetorical sense of a metaphor whose figurative character is no longer normally noticed. The status of conventional metaphor is contested within cognitive linguistics. Conceptual metaphor approaches associated particularly with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that conventional metaphorical mappings can continue to structure thought; experimental work has also challenged the claim that such conceptual mappings are necessarily activated in ordinary comprehension. The important claim here is therefore the more modest one: a metaphor can cease to be consciously experienced as metaphor while some of its associated conceptual relationships remain available.

[3] Oxford English Dictionary, ‘path, n.¹’, sense I.1.a: the earliest physical sense is a way or track formed through continued treading by people or animals rather than one deliberately planned and made. The Old English pæþ carried this sense. The history supports the association between path and previous passage; it does not imply that every modern path must literally have been created in this way.

[4] Online Etymology Dictionary, ‘career’. English career is recorded from the sixteenth century in the sense of a running or course, from French carrière, ‘road, racecourse’, ultimately related to Latin carrus, ‘chariot’. The sense of the course of one’s public or professional life developed later. The etymology is used here to expose semantic inheritance, not to claim that historical meanings determine contemporary ones.

[5] Super, D. E. (1980), ‘A life-span, life-space approach to career development’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 16(3), 282–298. Super defines career through the combination and sequence of roles occupied across a lifetime, including child, pupil or student, worker and other life roles. DOI: 10.1016/0001-8791(80)90056-1.

[6] Savickas, M. L. (2011), ‘Constructing careers: actor, agent, and author’, Journal of Employment Counseling, 48(4), 179–181. Savickas’s career construction theory emphasises career stories, agency and the construction of meaning. See also Savickas, M. L. (2012), ‘Life Design: A Paradigm for Career Intervention in the 21st Century’, Journal of Counseling & Development, 90(1), 13–19. DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-6676.2012.00002.x.

[7] I use conceptual gravity and related gravitational language here in my own metaphorical sense: the capacity of a concept or metaphor to attract neighbouring concepts and make alternative conceptualisations increasingly difficult to sustain. This should not be confused with Karl Maton’s established technical concept of semantic gravity within Legitimation Code Theory, which concerns the degree to which meaning is dependent upon context. See Maton, K. (2013), ‘Making semantic waves: A key to cumulative knowledge-building’, Linguistics and Education, 24(1), 8–22. DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.005.

[8] Department for Education (2026), Careers guidance and access for education and training providers: statutory guidance for schools, colleges and independent training providers, updated 23 June 2026. The guidance states that institutions must ensure young people have the careers education, information and guidance necessary to follow “a pathway that is right for them and aligns with employment opportunities”. The wording is particularly interesting here because individual suitability and labour-market alignment appear within the same formulation.

[9] Career Development Institute, Code of Ethics, principle of Impartiality. CDI members are required to remain aware of limitations on their impartiality, acknowledge their potential impact and adopt a neutral and non-directive approach with clients; the Code separately requires a client-centred approach. The argument in this essay is therefore not that professional careers practice has failed to recognise impartiality, but that institutionalised metaphor may create a conceptual problem upstream of individual practitioner conduct.

[10] I use conceptual foreclosure here descriptively rather than as a claim to an established construct within career-development theory: the point at which the dominance and material institutionalisation of one conceptual metaphor make alternative conceptualisations increasingly difficult to sustain. It describes the mechanism being proposed in this essay rather than a settled term imported from an existing theoretical framework.