Expectations of Skilled Career Counselors
The days of thirty years in a company are long gone. On average, Americans change jobs 7 times in their lifetime-change jobs within a field, change fields and change their lives. Portfolio careers is a term used to describe the transient way Americans have begun to manage their careers. We've become a nation of sub-contractors, moving from one company to another in a project-based system.
This trend has ensured the success of career counselors, but what does a career counselor actually do? Can they tell you what you should or shouldn't be doing with your life? Can they give you a test and identify your dream job? Can they, in six sessions or less, place you on the right path for lifelong satisfaction and fulfillment?
The fast answer is probably not, but then, that isn't always true. Believe it or not, it depends on the client. That's right; the client has to accept some responsibility for uncovering the answers to these questions for themselves.
Most career counselors believe that we hold all the information necessary to develop a perfect job description for ourselves. We know what we value, what we love, what activities make time fly. Tests and inventories can help us sift through the years of audio we've got stored in our brains: all the voices of well-meaning people in our lives who told us what we should do.
These people love us and meant no harm. Our mothers never wanted us to be miserable, they just wanted us to be productive citizens able to pay our own rent, do our own laundry and some day move out of our bedrooms so they could become sewing rooms, dens and guest rooms. Our fathers didn't force us into engineering school because he wanted us to dread Monday mornings; he wanted us to make enough money to buy the American dream, and pay for our own kids' orthodontia and piano lessons.
A skilled career counselor helps us still those other voices that may have urged us into jobs for which we are ill-suited. He or she provides the resources that enable us to explore our interests, examine our passions and reflect on our strengths, talents and limitations. If you hear your career counselor say the words, "you should be a..." or "you need to quit that job of yours and go into...", you're in the wrong office. Leave your mom's kitchen and hire a skilled career counselor who listens to you, knows how to ask deep probing questions that encourage self-reflection, and gives you lots of homework.
Lots of it.
Anyone examining a life change needs to spend a significant amount of time studying themselves, their current options and the consequences that change will bring with it. A skilled career counselor leads their clients to tools that help them clarify the environment that is most conducive to success for them. Work environment includes management styles, settings and time expectations. It includes the type of people that will become colleagues and clients. Values assessments are valuable tools that help people reflect on these issues and identify the work climate and resources they need to be happy in their career choices. The counselor provides these resources as well as reflective exercises, discussion questions and activities to help clients mine these pearls of wisdom for themselves.
Interest inventories, aptitude tests, strengths assessments can be valuable tools to help clients pursue ideas that might bring fulfillment and meaning. The career counselor makes the right tools available at the right time in the process. A skilled counselor doesn't overwhelm the client with a trunk full of tests, books and articles but determines the needs of each client and adjusts the homework to fit the situation. The goal of career counseling is to help the client determine what they want to do next. Sometimes, through this process, the client finds new meaning and fulfillment in their current position. Not all career counseling ends in workplace upheavals.
Once a client determines a direction, a skilled counselor can help them set realistic goals, determine action steps for reaching those goals and create a time-line for achieving those goals.
Counselors are not wizards who cast spells and wave wands so their clients can be happy.
A good career counselor's magic lies in knowing the right questions, utilizing the necessary tools and listening so the client can refine his own voice, because a skilled career counselor knows instinctively that the client's voice is the only one that really counts.
