Well-organized career information, guidance, and counseling services are important both to education systems, the labor market, and their interface. Career education is important within compulsory education because it lays the foundations for lifelong career development. In postcompulsory education, well-organized career information, guidance, and counseling services promote outcomes that help make better use of educational resources and increase both individual and social returns to investments in education. Within the labor market, well-organized career information, guidance, and counseling services can do the following things: (1) help improve individual decision making about jobs and training opportunities and improve the allocation of human talents within the labor market; (2) help improve the allocation of labor across regions, industries, and occupations in the face of labor demand fluctuations resulting from technological and structural change; and (3) affect the success of active labor market programs and active welfare-to-work programs. For these and other reasons, well-organized career information, guidance, and counseling services need to be high on national public policy agendas. The emphasis on lifelong learning and sustaining employability has implications for how such services should be provided. Possible roles for states in relation to such services are as follows: direct provider; main funder; residual funding source in areas of market failure; and quality assurer. (MN)