Glossaries are timebound and culturally bound compilations that enable communications within a field of of academic discipline, between professionals, and between professions and society. In the field of career guidance, glossaries have been developed by national associations of career practitioners to facilitate national and sectoral (education, training, employment, social) professional communication, that of the Canadian  Council for Career Development (CCCD) and CERIC, Canada, being a notable example.

Policy terminology for career development has become an important dimension in public discourse since the OECD, WB, and EC (and its agencies CEDEFOP and ETF) international policy reviews of career guidance in the early 2000s. As part of the follow-up to these reviews, the European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network (ELGPN) was established by the European Commission and the Member States. The ELGPN  deliberations on lifelong guidance policy development presented challenges to communication both between 31 different cultures and within countries across sectors. Indeed, the terms “lifelong guidance” to support lifelong learning represented a new approach to overcoming sectoral interests and policy and systems fragmentation at national levels. Thus, in 2014, the ELGPN produced a glossary of policy related terms to assist this communication. The ELGPN webpage that presents the Glossary contains links to the ELGPN database of initiatives and practices, with useful references for each of the Glossary terms on the right hand side of the web page.

The glossary was written originally in English but the authors recognise that some terms cannot easily be translated into other languages without losing some of their meaning. Some terms may also have been used in a more specialised or restricted context in certain countries, reflecting local circumstances. It has been translated into 9 other languages: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish.

The development of this European policy glossary for career guidance was a very ambitious and challenging international initiative.