It is becoming increasingly difficult for students to choose career paths which would fetch them rich dividends! With the competition soaring to sky levels students are listless and despondent about their career prospects. Inundated with suggestions galore from all quarters they don’t know which direction to go to. Career Counselling helps solve many issues regarding career choice and the best they can do is seek professional help to sort out issues. Career counseling can help in making the person independent in the true sense of the word. Armed with new found skills and confidence they can get jobs according to their interests.
The Five Steps
The five steps for effective career counseling strategy would be a process of starting, preparation, exploring the various options, implementing the principles and taking the final decision. Now you may ask how you would implement these strategies into career counseling. We would elucidate the same here focusing on the key issues of career counseling-
Initiation- In any enterprise the starting is important as even if the ball is set into motion the various obstacles might stall the process from reaching its finale. To elaborate on the point-
- Building a bond, and strengthening the relationship-It is very important to put the candidate at ease and use strategies to make them relax. The constant fluctuating circumstances would make the candidates nervous and on tenterhooks, it’s the job of the counselor to win their confidence so that they are able to confide in them, and tell them of their dreams and aspirations.
- Determining the real reason for choosing the particular career. As that will help counselors to determine various strategies as to what kind of career planning moves should they employ as different people need a different kind of activities.
- Encouraging them when they are down in the dumps. The candidates might lose hope and think their future looks bleak it is then the counselor’s think of various hope fostering strategies to bring their spirits up.
Preparation-
Preparation usually involves a preparing various career planning strategies and planning how to reach for the candidates career goals.
Developing an action course-A well thought out strategy would help the candidate to reach out for the career goals sooner than later. A graphic planning strategy could help simplify things. The plan is to have another backup plan, so that if one plan fails there would be another plan to fall back upon.
Developing skills to focus on the whole personality, skills which enable job searching, skills in education which help to learn new skills and learn how to apply for new courses in institutions. Personal skills also get a dekko as learning how to manage anger can help the person overcome his weaknesses.
Implementation-
There are many times when students often have a good start in their counseling journey and lose hope midway, thinking they are not getting the desired results. But after kick-starting the process one has to wait patiently for the implementation of the myriad well-thought out ideas. They must be given some Psychometric career tests to find out what are their characteristics and their innate interests. They are given a few situations and the students are asked to behave according to the situation. This is a very important way to assess the candidates inner thoughts processes which would help them to find out if faced with a similar situation later in their lives how would they able to tackle a similar situation. This is a self-unravelling process very important to match character traits with career goals.
Exploration-
Once the character assessing is accomplished the next rung on the ladder would be to find out the jobs most suitable for the respective candidates, interviewing, job shadowing, internships. These experiences would teach them to learn whether the particular job profile they were looking at is really suitable for their kind of skills and temperament. Mingling with the people who have a similar kind of job profile can prove to be efficacious as well. This kind of networking techniques works very well as the candidates would get a second-hand experience about the job environment. Internships give the candidates a feel and clairvoyance about the job and work pressure. There are many times when a candidate realizes that the job is perhaps not meant for him. The opposite of that maybe also true, he may find out that the job is exactly right for him.
The Final Decision-
After various processes, the time comes when one has to seal the deal or go for the final call. This process is not without a good bit of fear and trepidation, fear as in fear of the unknown. Whether the decision is the right one. Whether they could have done better by going to the second alternative. These questions continue to bother the candidates. It is then the job of the counselor to assure them that this indeed is the best option for them. All decisions come with a certain degree of ambiguity and it can never be fool-proof. The best thing would be to have confidence and forge ahead vanquishing the tiny voice of naysayer from within that keeps telling you to stop and rethink!
Finally, When the candidate seeks the job that he has been hankering for there is a burst of amalgamation of the feeling of contentment and happiness. Each journey is different and each candidate is unique so the career counselors must think of unique strategies to help the candidate reach his favored goal! By resorting to these career strategies a career counselor can help the candidate fulfill his aspirations in the best way possible.
