How do universities really support students who are anxious about the future, overwhelmed by study, or unsure what to do with their degree? This question was at the heart of a recent online panel on career counselling in higher education, organised within the CEE Guidance Forum project and broadcast live from Craiova, where Romanian university counsellors were gathered for their annual conference.
The event brought together practitioners and experts from Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. They provided a rich, very concrete conversation about legal frameworks, everyday practice, creative experiments and real constraints in university-level career guidance.
The panel took place as part of a larger conference hosted by the University of Craiova and the Romanian Association of Career Counsellors (ACROM). While participants on-site followed from the conference hall, others joined online as part of the CEE Guidance Forum, a project aimed at strengthening cooperation between career guidance associations in Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.
The project’s goal is quite simple: to offer a space where associations and professionals can compare their realities, share ideas and tools, and support change in their national systems. In this spirit, the panel focused specifically on career counselling in higher education – a field where all four countries face similar issues, but each in its own way.
The discussion was facilitated by Elena-Irina Macovei, psychologist at the University of Bucharest and psychotherapist in private practice. Drawing on her experience in therapeutic work with adults and adolescents, she reminded participants that career questions rarely come alone: they are often interwoven with anxiety, depression, trauma, burnout, sleep problems or addictions.
Czechia: experimenting under a loose national framework
On behalf of the Czech partner, Zuzana Freibergová began by sketching the landscape. Czech higher education includes 53 institutions and over 300,000 students. The Higher Education Act requires public institutions to provide information and guidance related to studies and graduates’ career opportunities. In reality, however, each institution implements this obligation in its own way. There is no central national model for student services.
Zuzana recently went through the websites of all Czech institutions to see what services are actually visible. Study advising is present everywhere, but psychological counselling, career guidance or support for students with special needs vary significantly from one university to another. Some institutions offer a wide range of services, from legal and socio-economic counselling to addiction counselling and spiritual support. Others – especially smaller private schools – show almost nothing on their websites, even if some form of counselling may exist in practice.
What makes the Czech context particularly interesting is the existence of the Association of Higher Education Counsellors. It has become a genuine professional community, organising more than twenty seminars, webinars and meetings per year. Once a year, university career centres have their own dedicated meeting, where they exchange good practices, compare failures as well as successes, and generate ideas for joint projects. Over time, this regular contact has helped universities move beyond isolation and start thinking more collectively about quality and innovation.
From this national overview, the focus moved to a single university.
A “one-man army” in Prague
Přemysl Gubani, head of the Career Centre at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague (ČZU), offered a very concrete and sometimes humorous glimpse into daily work. The university has about 22,000 students; the career centre has… him.
“I’ve been running the centre for eleven years,” he explained. “People call me ‘head of the career centre’, but in fact they should call me ‘executive assistant of myself’.” Behind the joke lies a familiar reality for many universities in the region: ambitious expectations with minimal staffing and funding. Despite this, the centre manages to offer:
- around 100–150 individual consultations per year in Czech and English,
- about 15 career workshops annually on topics such as job search, LinkedIn use or managing chance events,
- and roughly a dozen employer-linked events, including a career fair and new formats tested every year.
What is striking is the systematic way in which Přemysl and his colleagues think about their practice. The centre is built around clear theoretical frameworks – the Chaos Theory of Careers and Happenstance Learning Theory – and systematically evaluates its activities, using tools like the Career Adapt-Ability Scale or the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale. They experiment with new formats (Internship Festival, Thesis Festival, “Hidden Jobs” events presenting less visible functions in companies) and then measure what actually changes for students.
One of their key initiatives is a semester-long career seminar, offered to students from programmes with higher unemployment rates. After eleven pilots in different formats, the conclusion is clear: the longer the structured course, the greater the impact on students’ confidence in their career decisions.
Looking ahead, the team is preparing a “Testival”: a mock career fair where students can rehearse their interactions with “employers” (played by students from the Career Guidance study programme), test how they introduce themselves and receive feedback before meeting real recruiters at the actual career fair.
All of this, Přemysl insisted, happens under constant pressure: the need to earn at least €30,000 per year with employer-related activities to fund the centre; the difficulty of convincing students to attend events; and the feeling that there is never enough time or staff. Yet the energy to try new things is very much there.
Hungary: a regulated system with a strong counselling culture
From Czechia the discussion moved to Hungary, where, as Klaudia Tolli explained, the legal framework for higher education is more explicit. Hungarian legislation requires universities to provide services that support academic progress, employability and career planning. Career centres or student service offices are mandatory, and they are expected to offer a mix of individual counselling, group activities, internship coordination and employer events.
Career guidance is not entirely separate from teaching. In many programmes it is linked to the curriculum, so that students can see more clearly how their studies connect to labour-market demands and to the development of transferable skills. Universities organise internships, maintain partnerships with employers and run job portals, while also providing psychological support and study skills coaching.
These services are part of a wider lifelong guidance system and are aligned with EU frameworks. The Hungarian Higher Education Counselling Association plays an important role in defining types of counselling and in offering supervision and professional development for counsellors.
“They don’t always feel they have agency”: a psychologist’s view from Hungary
Anett Balogh, psychologist at the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, described her work in psychological and career counselling for students across several campuses.
Her sessions are usually short (one to four appointments), voluntary and individual. Students come with two typical timing patterns: either at the beginning of their studies, when they are unsure whether they have chosen the right programme, or at the end, when the job search becomes urgent and anxiety rises.
What she sees regularly is a narrow narrative about career success: the belief that there is one ideal job to find, and that the main difficulty is simply locating and securing it. Many students have little experience, feel intimidated by the labour market and are not fully aware of their own skills or resources. They arrive with messages they hear everywhere: that it is difficult to find a job, that they lack experience, that “no one will choose them”.
Anett works with methods borrowed from coaching (decision-making models, SMART goals), but also with something more basic: helping students see what they already have – internal resources, soft skills, personal qualities – and what they can offer even before they have a long CV. She spends time mapping skills, expectations and fears, and asking them to think beyond the moment they “get the job”: What happens if they don’t get it? What happens after they do? What does it mean to be a good employee, not just a good applicant?
She is also very transparent about her own limits. When students ask highly specific questions about specialised job markets, she does not pretend to be an expert. Instead, she turns this into an opportunity to model how to search for information, analyse job offers and build a method they can use on their own later. At the same time, this honesty can be frustrating for students who hoped for ready-made answers. To compensate, she relies on the broader Centre of Student Services: alumni networks, events, and contacts with teaching staff.
Anett stressed that many of her students are in a double transition: they are leaving adolescence and parental dependence while at the same time being expected to plan financially sustainable adult lives. Some have learning difficulties that were supported at lower levels of education but are now poorly handled at university. Others are caught between their own wishes and strong expectations from parents or family businesses, particularly in agricultural fields. For all of them, the emotional dimension of career choice is impossible to ignore.
Slovakia: new legal support and integrated services in Košice
From Slovakia, Veronika Zibrinyiová brought both a national and an institutional perspective. Nationally, an important change occurred in 2022, when career guidance was explicitly written into the Higher Education Act as part of support and counselling services. Universities must now provide free counselling with the aims of supporting students’ mental health and motivation, reducing drop-out and helping them enter the labour market.
This legal recognition, even if the wording is vague, is a step forward. It means that the existence of guidance services no longer depends solely on the goodwill of individual university leaders. In parallel, a new Act on Adult Education is being implemented, with innovations such as individual learning accounts, micro-credentials and better recognition of non-formal learning. These changes will also influence how universities think about learning and guidance throughout the life course.
At the institutional level, Veronika presented the work of UNIPOC, the University Counselling Centre at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, which serves around 10,000 students from two universities. UNIPOC offers psychological counselling, career guidance, learning support, legal and social counselling, and services for students with specific needs. Demand for psychological support is rising sharply, and two full-time psychologists are fully booked. Career and learning counselling are provided by one person on a half-time contract, which limits the number of students who can be seen.
To structure its career services, UNIPOC developed a simple model with four interconnected dimensions: information, self-knowledge, competence development and job opportunities. Information includes labour-market trends, job search strategies, AI and career themes, and more recently green guidance. Self-knowledge involves helping students identify strengths, weaknesses, values and work preferences, notably through an interactive e-learning programme called My Career with ten steps, videos and exercises. Some faculties integrate this programme into first-year courses so that all new students become aware of the centre and its services.
Competence development takes place through workshops and trainings on key career skills and career management. The “job opportunities” dimension aims to connect students directly with employers, through a career fair, a Career Club of more than forty partner companies, and a job portal integrated into the academic information system. This portal allows students to see only offers relevant to their study field, so that it does not become an endless and demotivating list.
Veronika also mentioned new topics emerging in counselling sessions: students’ desire to change study programme, their ambivalence about artificial intelligence and the future of work, and a growing curiosity about green guidance and sustainable careers.
Romania: legal texts, real constraints and persistent stigma
The final national contribution came from Romania, presented by Elena-Irina Macovei. On paper, Romania has a legal and strategic framework that recognises the importance of career guidance in education and employment. In practice, implementation remains highly uneven.
Irina described sharp contrasts between large universities in major cities and smaller institutions, between public and private universities, and between centres that manage to secure European funding and those that do not. Across the board, one pattern is clear: teams are small and overstretched. In the morning session of the Craiova conference, participants calculated that, on average, there is one psychologist or counsellor for about 7,000 students in Romanian higher education.
Career centres usually offer individual career counselling and, in some universities, psychological counselling and assessment tools. Group formats include workshops on CVs, interviews, job search and time management, as well as stress, anxiety and self-knowledge. Many of these interventions have moved online in recent years. Career fairs, company presentations, alumni talks and internships provide contact with employers, but not all students benefit from them.
Irina stressed that in Romania career education is rarely integrated into the curriculum. It remains largely optional and extracurricular. This means that students who are already overloaded with academic requirements have to make an extra effort to seek out guidance. Families also play a very strong role in career decisions, and many students rely more on informal networks and personal contacts than on formal university services when looking for a job.
One of the most sensitive issues she raised was the stigma surrounding psychological counselling. The idea that “if you see a psychologist, you must be crazy or sick” is still widespread in Romanian society. This stigma does not only affect mental health services; it also colours how students perceive any form of help-seeking, including career counselling, when it is provided by psychologists.
Despite these obstacles, Irina also pointed to important positive elements: the existence of a national network of career centres, the dynamic role of ACROM in bringing professionals together, and the contribution of European projects such as Erasmus+ in funding new initiatives and building expertise. Participation in mobility programmes is, in itself, a powerful form of career development for students.
Shared challenges, shared opportunities
At the end of the panel, one conclusion was difficult to ignore: the four systems look remarkably similar in their struggles, even when the legal texts differ. Everywhere, university career centres are expected to deal with a complex mix of labour-market uncertainty, student stress, mental health issues and institutional constraints – often with minimal staff and limited budgets.
Everywhere, too, the same questions arise:
- How can we reach students earlier, not just in their final year?
- How do we reduce stigma and make it normal to ask for help?
- How can we integrate career thinking into curricula instead of treating it as an extra?
- How do we support counsellors themselves, so they do not burn out under permanent overload?
The event also showed how much can be gained from talking across borders. Hearing about the Czech network of counsellors, the Hungarian regulatory framework, the Slovak My Career e-learning or the Romanian debates on stigma opens up possibilities, challenge assumptions, and provide concrete ideas to adapt at home.
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Presentations are available on this link.