For Authors

The Journal publishes articles on the broad theme of career development in any context: 

  • Career development in the workplace: private and public sector, small, medium, and large organisations, private practitioners.
  • Career development in education: schools, colleges, universities, adult education, public career services.
  • Career development in the community: third age, voluntary, charity, social organisations, independent contexts, public career services.

Career development is understood here to encompass both discussions of how individuals and groups make their way through life, learning and work and interventions that take place within education, employment, and welfare systems to support human flourishing.

It is designed to be read by individuals who are involved in career development related work in a wide range of settings including information, advice, counselling, guidance, advocacy, coaching, mentoring, psychotherapy, education, teaching, training, scholarship, research, consultancy, human resources, management, or policy. The journal has a national and international readership.

The Journal does not publish articles that address the following areas without including material of explicit relevance to career development:

  • Human resources, such as recruitment and selection
  • Education
  • The psychology or sociology of work

Authors should make the relevance of their topic to the field of career development explicit. 

Use of literature

All submissions are expected to make appropriate use of the published literature on careers, career counselling, and career education.  Authors should consult the Journal archive to familiarise themselves with the Journal style, and the nature of articles previously published on their topic. 

Authors should not assume that readers are familiar with the contexts that they are writing about. This means that all articles should include sufficient background material to make them intelligible to readers who are learning about this area for the first time. The readership is predominantly in the UK and Europe, but becoming increasingly global. Authors should consider the literature that will connect with the readers’ understandings and help to contextualise the article.

Issue format

Issues of the Journal usually contain the articles which have most recently been accepted through the Journal’s review process. Editors have the authority to vary the issue in which an accepted article appears to increase the coherence of the journal.

The journal also features special sections – a group of themed articles within an open call issue. This format is likely to be used more often going forward. 

In the past the Journal regularly published Special issues which focused on articles relating to a theme identified by the editors. Special issues may still be produced in the future, but these are expected to be less common. In addition to a call for papers, authors with specific expertise may be invited by the editor to submit to a special issue.

Deadlines for submission will be published on the Journal website. However, articles may be submitted at any time and may be considered for future issues if a deadline is missed.

Publication schedule

The Journal publishes two issues per year, one in the spring (normally April) and one in the autumn (normally October). In addition to online open access publication of articles at www.nicecjournal.co.uk, full issue pdfs are made available via the NICEC website www.nicec.org and also to CDI members.