Occupational safety and health appears in many higher education programs. Universities rarely state what students must be able to do in situations involving occupational risk. This study analyses how occupational safety and health is defined and assessed in research on curriculum design, competence frameworks, and educational evaluation. The analysis used competence mapping, alignment checks, and cross-level tracing to examine learning outcomes, teaching activities, and assessment formats. The results suggest that safety is treated as knowledge of hazards and rules. Assessment depends on recall and procedural compliance. Judgment, decisions under real conditions, and responsibility allocation are not evaluated. A framework is derived that defines safety through three forms of performance, risk interpretation, action selection, and decision justification, organized across non-equivalent levels of evidence. Learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessment are connected to these performance requirements. Progression can be defined and checked across program stages. Occupational safety and health become a form of transversal academic competence when it is defined through evidence from performed tasks instead of topic coverage or regulatory content.

The transition from lower to upper secondary education is a critical developmental stage, requiring decisions with long-term academic and professional consequences. Addressing a gap in evidence that often treats counselling, family educational capital, and place of residence separately, this study examines how these factors jointly relate to students’ high school track/profile choice and their intention to pursue higher education in the Romanian educational transition. Using a standardized questionnaire, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 1392 lower secondary students (aged 13–14) from Brașov County, Romania, to map preferred tracks, influencing factors, perceptions of high school, and the values framing decision-making. High school track/profile choice emerged as a central “decision node”, strongly associated with participation in counselling p < 0.001; Cramer’s V = 0.678) and significantly related to parents’ educational level and university intentions. Substantial urban–rural differences were observed in track/profile choice (p < 0.001; V = 0.442), with urban students selecting the “real” track more frequently (≈68%) than rural students (≈37%). University intention was high overall, with a small but significant urban–rural difference (≈89.7% vs. ≈86.9%; p = 0.028; V = 0.072). Findings support integrating counselling into coherent adolescent career development models and expanding services to reduce contextual disparities through stronger school–family–community partnerships. This evidence is relevant for education policy and practice by supporting the scaling of school-based career guidance and targeted measures to reduce rural–urban disparities.