What Career Counselors Don’t Do?
Multiple factors affect your career development, including your abilities, interests, background, values, circumstances, and personality.
Multiple factors affect your career development, including your abilities, interests, background, values, circumstances, and personality. With career counseling, you can know yourself and the world of work better. This will help you to make informed educational, career, and life decisions. Earlier, schools used to focus mostly on educational counseling where the counselors helped students cope with their academic and life problems. But these days, most schools have physical career counselors or online career counseling tools.
Using a wide variety of career counseling techniques, these counselors help students plan for their future profession as well as career-related academic success.
But many students (and even their parents, at times) often take career counselors as some magic wand wavers who can put everything right on their behalf. It’s important to understand what these professionals can’t do so that you have realistic expectations from them.
1- Don’t take decisions for you
Are you hesitant about what career path you should take? Are you a college graduate who’s having trouble finding the right job or sticking to one? Do you plan to start your career in a specific field but don’t know where to start from or how to proceed? Do you need better insights into what type of jobs would suit your interests and aptitude the best? A career counselor can help you get answers to all these questions using different career counseling techniques.
Whether you’re a graduate searching for a job or a freshman looking to weigh different career options, a career counselor will work with you to help you understand what you want out of your education and career. But remember that he or she can’t make decisions for you. Instead, the professional can simply make you understand the planning and decision-making process. It’s you who’ll need to decide the course of action and the sooner you begin planning your future, the better positioned you’ll be!
2- Don’t transform your career if you’re unwilling
Career counselors aren’t magicians. You can consider them gurus or advice-givers at best. But they can just show you the path. It’s you who’ll need to walk down that path because the counselors won’t do it for you. For instance, if you’re stuck in a job that makes you unhappy, feel unmotivated to change your career direction, or can’t find the right job and refuse to act on what the counselor has suggested, your career would stay stuck where it is today. Even the best counselor won’t be of much help if you can’t act on the suggestions put forward to transform your career.
Remember — your career counselor can use career counseling techniques and tools to help you in plotting vital career moves with timely and relevant suggestions.
But the responsibility lies with you to act on such suggestions. If you think your counselor will transform your career without you doing anything, you can’t be farther from the truth.
3- Don’t act as recruiters
If making your next professional move is proving to be a difficult chore, you can seek help from a career counselor.
A counselor will make you understand what drives you and help you identify professions that best suit your needs, career, and life goals, and personality.
But career counselors aren’t recruiters because they don’t promote particular industries or jobs. They will simply suggest what they think could work for you, and from there, you’ll have to take charge and decide which options you would like to pursue further.
