The Guidance Barometer — Issue 1: The Job Your Client Can't Find Locally May Exist a Few Borders Away

THE GUIDANCE BAROMETER — Issue 1 · September 2026 A monthly briefing for career counsellors, published by NexPath. Free, no conditions.

Welcome to the first issue. This exists because of a sentence we keep hearing from counsellors, in almost identical words: clients ask what to study so they get a job, and there is no reliable data to answer with. Each issue takes one piece of European labour-market or policy data and works out what it actually means for a session at your desk, not theory, not a product pitch, just the data and what to do with it.

This issue: the job your client can't find locally may exist a few borders away. The data says that's true for almost every occupation currently in shortage somewhere in Europe.

The same job is impossible to fill in one country and oversupplied in another

What Europe's labour data says, and what it means at a counsellor's desk

Every career counsellor knows the moment. A client sits down. They are qualified, experienced, willing to work, and there are no jobs in their field where they live. You have no good answer, because the honest one sounds like a dismissal.

The latest European data suggests the answer may exist. It is just not in the same country.

The finding

The European Labour Authority's 2025 report on labour shortages and surpluses covers the EURES countries: 2,617 reported shortage occupation-country pairs and 2,177 reported surplus occupation-country pairs in total.

The number that should change how we advise people is this one, stated directly in the report's own executive summary:

98% of the occupations facing a shortage in at least one country are simultaneously in surplus in another.

Near-universal, not the exception. (A separate ELA annex table lists 416 occupations already known to have a matching shortage and surplus somewhere — by construction, every row in that table matches, which is a narrower and weaker fact than the 98% finding above; this piece originally cited that table's internal consistency as if it were the headline figure, which it isn't.)

Around 53 million workers (roughly a quarter of European employment) are in occupations affected by widespread shortage or surplus. And 57% of the reported shortages are rated medium or high severity, so these are not marginal gaps.

Where the gaps are

In shortage, consistently: health and care (doctors, nurses, care workers) in a sector employing around 25 million people across Europe. Alongside them, the building trades: electricians, explicitly tied in the data to green-transition and renewable-energy demand, plus plumbers and roofers, part of the same construction-shortage cluster. Shortages cluster in professionals, trades workers and machine operators.

In surplus: clerical roles and design-adjacent creative fields. Reported surpluses appear in Latvia, Austria — and Finland.

That last point matters for anyone advising clients here. If your client is in a clerical or creative occupation in Finland, the local picture is not a personal failure or a temporary dip, but a structural surplus. And the same occupation is very likely short-staffed elsewhere.

Why people do not simply move

The report is clear that the imbalance persists for reasons that have nothing to do with willingness:

1. Qualification recognition. The destination country may not treat the qualification as equivalent, or the profession is regulated and the route to practising is unclear.
2. Language. Obvious, and often the first thing raised — sometimes as a reason not to explore further.
3. Wage differences. A shortage in a low-paying market is not an opportunity.
4. Simply not knowing. Nobody told them the demand existed.

Three of those four are information problems that counsellors, not clients, are equipped to solve.

What this changes in a session

Stop treating the local labour market as the whole labour market. When a client's occupation is in structural surplus where they live, "keep applying" is not advice. The useful questions become: where is this occupation short? What would it take to be employable there? Is that realistic for this person, with this family, this year?

Recognition first, language second. Language is usually the first objection raised, and it is the wrong place to start. If the qualification cannot be recognised at all, the language work is wasted effort. Check recognition first, then the language requirement for that specific occupation in that specific country — which is often lower than the client assumes.

Adjacency beats relocation. Most clients will not move countries. But an occupation in surplus locally usually sits next to occupations that are not — sharing most of the same competences. The shortage list is also a map of where nearby skills are worth more.

The adjacency table

Six occupations reported in surplus in Finland in the ELA 2025 annex, each matched against its nearest occupations by shared essential competences among occupations reported in shortage somewhere else in Europe. One note on the design-adjacent example before the table: "graphic and multimedia designer," the occupation this piece originally planned to use, doesn't appear anywhere in this edition of the ELA extract — not flagged shortage or surplus, in any country. Interior designer is used instead below, as the nearest documented Finland-surplus design occupation with a real, traceable shortage-side match (excluding trivial same-group matches, optional ESCO competences, and zero-overlap candidates).

The honest reading of these numbers: the overlaps are real but modest, typically 3 to 7 shared competences against totals in the 11–44 range (roughly 15–50%). Nobody should read this table as "these are basically the same job." Some of what a Finnish clerical worker or interior designer already knows transfers directly to a specific occupation short-staffed elsewhere, though not the whole skill set.

The strongest match in the table by a clear margin is secretary → administrative assistant, sharing 14 of 20 competences (roughly 70% overlap), and a genuinely close adjacency, not a stretch. At the other end, interior designer → pyrotechnic designer shares only 4 of 39 competences: a real, computed result, but exactly the kind of pairing that deserves a human sanity check in a live session rather than being read on its own as career advice.

Recognition, occupation by occupation

"Will my qualification be accepted?" has an answer, and it varies by occupation and by country. Regulated professions (where practising without recognition is unlawful) follow a different route from unregulated ones, where an employer decides.

For the full set of occupations in the adjacency table above (6 surplus occupations and their 14 distinct shortage-side matches, 20 occupations in total), checked against the EU Regulated Professions Database (560 generic profession categories, 31 countries): 19 of the 20 are not regulated anywhere in the register at all — not just in Finland, in any of the 31 countries covered. Clerical work (billing clerk, bank teller, secretary, receptionist, and their shortage-side matches like accounting assistant and administrative assistant) and the other creative and logistics occupations in the table simply don't appear as a licensed profession anywhere in Europe.

Practical meaning for a counsellor: for these occupations, "will my qualification be recognised" isn't a legal question with a fixed answer — there's no licensing authority to apply to. It's an employer's hiring decision, based on how they read a foreign CV and an interview. That's a barrier — unfamiliarity, unconscious bias, unclear equivalence — but it's a different barrier from a licensing gate, and the practical advice differs accordingly: a strong portfolio, a recognised local reference, or a short local placement can move an employer's judgment, in a way that no amount of paperwork can move a licensing requirement.

The one exception: interior designer. Regulated — under the generic profession "Interior designer-architect" — in seven countries: Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. All seven use the general system of recognition under Directive 2005/36/EC, meaning the professional applies to that country's competent authority for an individual assessment; it isn't automatic. The minimum qualification level required ranges from a secondary-level certificate (one of two recognised routes in Luxembourg) up to a four-year-plus post-secondary diploma (the Netherlands) — worth checking country by country before assuming either the easiest or the hardest case applies.

This was checked carefully: "secretary" was not matched to the UK's "Chartered secretary" (a company-governance role), "accounting assistant" was not matched to "Accounting technician" (a distinct, higher-qualified occupation), and two finance-clerk roles were not matched to regulated advisory titles that only sound similar. The count stands at one of twenty, not more.

What we are doing with this

We publish this as a free monthly briefing for practising counsellors: labour-market movement, recognition rules, and what actually closes the gap between where a client is and where the work is. No cost, no conditions.

Subscribe using the form alongside this article to get the next issue directly. Issue 2: does the qualification your client already has actually let them work where the job is? The EU has a formal answer, occupation by occupation — most counsellors have never had reason to learn it.

Sources: European Labour Authority / EURES, "Labour shortages and surpluses in Europe 2025", published June 2026 (ela.europa.eu). Shortage/surplus totals (2,617 / 2,177) and the 98% overlap figure are quoted directly from the report's own executive summary — not from ELA's separate "transnational matching possibilities" annex table, which lists only occupations already pre-filtered to have a match. The 53-million-worker, quarter-of-employment figure and the 57% medium/high-severity share are also quoted directly from the report's executive summary. Occupation and competence mapping: ESCO. Recognition data: the EU Regulated Professions Database.