What is Career Counselling?
Career Counseling is a process of giving advice and support by Career Counselors to their clients to help them choose the right career in life.
Career Counseling includes career exploration, making career choices, managing career changes, lifelong career development and dealing with other career-related issues.
Career Counseling involves-
Receiving information and support to make holistic and realistic choices about career, future education and personal goals.
Motivating the clients by helping them identify their actual potential, strengths and weaknesses and suggest a path most suited to them.
Why do we need Career Counseling?
Career Counseling helps in the holistic development of students by
fully developing their competencies and abilities.
Giving access to expert resources.
Removing career-related frustrations.
Assisting students in understanding their interests, strengths and opportunities for improvement.
Attaining maturity needed to make their personal, educational and career decisions.
Improving performance in school.
How does Career Counseling work?
Career Counseling involves scientifically developed aptitude tests and personality tests. With the help of these tests, the Career Counselor gives the best-suited career advice to the students based on his report. Tests involve checking the following traits of the client:-
Attitude: How an individual actively adapts to his/her environment?
Aptitude: The capacity of an individual to carry out or perform a given task, functions, jobs etc.
Capacity or Knowledge: The set of cognitive abilities that make it possible to prepare, process, and connect knowledge to act and interact in given situations.
Competency: The capacity of an individual to carry out a fully identified activity or task based on defined performance criteria.
Skill: The set of practical abilities related to concrete tasks that involve the senses.
Ability: The potential that a human being has to acquire, manage and implement new knowledge and skills gained with a person's knowledge and practice/ experience.
Interests: Inclinations or preferences of an individual for activities, persons or things.
Occupation: Indicates different professional and social roles played by a person throughout his/her lifetime.
Work: The set of human activities compensated or not that produces goods or services in an economy or satisfies the needs of a community.
Who Needs Career Counseling?
Student who has finished middle school: The students must start strengthening their focus and concentration on career decisions at the end of middle school. The students must sow the seeds of success at this stage. So Career Counseling becomes essential to expose the students to career choices after recognizing their skills and talents through various psychometric tests.
Student who has completed class 10 and is looking forward to stream selection: Knowing about career choice is critical at this stage because if the child opts for a stream that is not suitable for him and will not benefit him, he will waste two crucial years of his life.
This is the stage where student gathers a lot of information from misinformed people and some from overconfident peers. Opting for correct subjects for a bright career is most important at this stage.
Students having completed class 12th: After completing class 12, more responsibilities fall on the shoulders of the students. This is the time when students actually face the actual competition and the rat race for
seeking admission in good colleges.
filling forms and applying for various entrance.
to make regular career choices.
A College Graduate: After graduation, most of the students are clueless about what they could be in life, so career guidance is needed to reach a decision whether to go for a job or pursue higher studies. Career counselling not only prepares the individual for an immediate sense of achievement but also makes him ready for long and successful professional life ahead.
You are not happy with your current job: Most of the times people underperform in their jobs, maybe because their job choices are not correct. Career Counselling can help you put away your negativity as well as helps you in making a new, improved plan for success.
You are doing a good job but lack job satisfaction: When your appointment is not as per your attitude or aptitude, or it does not excite you, you remain dissatisfied. Career Counselling can help you in identifying the actual problem and can guide you.
You know what you want but feel lost with so many options: Sometimes the students have a lot many choices, and they are unable to decide what will be the best choice; a Career Counsellor can come to your rescue.
What is the right time to go for Career Counseling?
Any time is the right time to seek career advice. But the most appropriate time is when the child is in class 8/9 or 10. Career counselling becomes very important when a student reaches secondary classes; otherwise, the students become indecisive after completing their 10th about what to do further. This indecisiveness can be because of peer pressure, lack of parental guidance or ignorance of personal potential. Students enroll for a course not knowing exactly what it offers and the specific skills that the system requires.
The Career Counsellor assists the student to choose the right course that matches the skill sets of the student to maximize satisfaction and performance and making his life successful.