What is Career Counseling?

If you’re here, chances are you’ve heard of the term career counseling but you aren’t sure what it even means. Is it like therapy? Is it learning skills to get a job? Is it for people in a career or people looking for a career? These are all good questions and after reading this post, I hope you walk away knowing what career counseling is and knowing if it is right for you.

Let’s start with some definitions.

Career: an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress.

Counseling: the provision of assistance and guidance in resolving personal, social, or psychological problems and difficulties, especially by a professional.

Coaching: the provision of training, instruction, or guidance to an individual or a group to build or create skills to improve their productivity or overcome a performance problem.

(Thanks, Google)

Ok, so what is career counseling?

Career counseling can take on a variety of forms, but often it involves working with a professional who guides or supports you in exploring and/or pursuing a career of some kind. This can include a variety of skills or styles so finding the right career counselor is an important part to the process.

If you’re curious about my work, feel free to reach out to me through my contact form. I offer free consultations where we can discuss your needs and decide together if I’m the right fit for you.

There will also be times where you actually do know what you want to pursue but you need some help finding or landing the right job. In these situations, I’ll often recommend career coaching. Career coaching is more about skills than exploration. In career counseling, you might learn some skills, but these will be at a more basic level. Again, the key of career counseling is about exploration and direction.

What can I expect in career counseling?

Typically, in the first session, your career counselor will go through an intake session. This is time for the career counselor to get a clearer picture of what your career journey has looked like so far. From there, you and your counselor will touch on a few key points that I’ve outlined below:

Knowing yourself

Knowing yourself means learning about things like your interests, skills, personality and work values. Career counseling will often explore these through career assessments. As you learn more about yourself, you create a sort of filter as you look at jobs. You start to learn what you enjoy doing, what skills you already have, what motivates or drives your work, and what you really need your job to provide for you.

The beautiful thing about this process of knowing yourself is that there are some great career assessments to get you started. A career counselor can help you decide which assessments fit you best so that you aren’t randomly taking quizzes off a google search.

I talk a lot about free career assessments in previous posts. Oftentimes the information from these is easy to interpret. However, having a career counselor who understands how to compile all the information into a single career profile can be invaluable. I would love to talk more with you about this in a free consultation.

Knowing your options

Knowing your options starts to dive into the actual careers that are out there. I may have said it in a previous post but one of my favorite things to hear from a client or a friend is “I didn’t even know that was a career choice til now.” When clients have that “aha” moment, it’s like watching all the puzzle pieces fall into place.

Knowing your options can mean browsing a resource like CareerOneStop or O*Net Online to learn more about what these jobs actually look like. It can also mean talking to friends and family. (I’m talking about networking, dear reader.) When you start to share your newfound knowledge about yourself with others close to you, their own wheels start turning and you may find yourself talking about a career option that had never even occurred to you.

Applying what you know

As I said before, once you know yourself better, you begin to look at jobs differently. When you know what resources are out there for job hunting, you also have the information to start researching the jobs themselves with this new information.

In career counseling, applying what you know means taking all the information above and beginning to think critically about the process. Sometimes getting an outside perspective can help too. That whole “thinking outside of the box” is a lot easier when you have a person who is literally outside the box already. An outside perspective is a great resource. So whether it’s a career counselor or a trusted family member or friend, share what you know and talk through it.

Developing and practicing skills

One last thing you can expect from career counseling is a focus on skills such as “How to write a Resume” or “How to Ace and Interview.” Often, a career counselor is able to go through these skills and offer you feedback on ways to improve them. Sometimes the counselor will recommend further support such as using a resume writing service or spending time going through a “mock interview.”

Though much of career counseling is about learning what career path fits you best. It’s also about giving you the understanding and skills to pursue something you love. You may tackle questions about going back to school or how to network with others. These are all great questions to consider as you go through this process.

If you’re curious about what you can expect from me, I offer a summary of my first 4 sessions with career clients on the career services page.

Do I need career counseling?

In truth, whether you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, wondering if you should go back to school, or choosing between 2 great job offers, career counseling can help. Career counseling can provide support for burnout, help you re-evaluate your career goals, and even provide you insight into having hard conversations with your boss. It’s a resource rarely used but often valuable in today’s world.

So in the end, I believe career counseling can be for anyone and everyone, but if you’re still not sure, reach out to me!

I offer a free 20-minute consultation to talk with clients about how I work and how I can help. It’s also our chance to decide if I’m the right fit for you. I will never ask people to pay for a service they don’t need.