Career Counseling is a process.
Therefore it can be defined.
By defining, it can be learned.
Learning and re-learning can become a habit.
Habit-forming should be the goal to be achieved by career counselors with every student.
Six distinct stages or plateaus form this long-term process, with three based on student-internal resources and the other three relying on resources external to the student.
Stage 1: The student displays an honest show of maturation, from being dependent to being an independent thinker regarding life-planning responsibility.
Research shows this psychological career maturation fully emerges at about age 23.
This is the age when 'choosing' changes to 'deciding'.
Without this conviction a student may not become owner of the planning process.
A "want to" rather than a "have to" attitude must prevail for a student to succeed, with career counselor assistance.
Stage 2: Because prior life experiences are developmentally influential, recall and discussion of them should become the planning platform.
With repeated guidance, students learn to examine the most pleasant among these past events to find the patterns of values, interests and skills they personally possess.
A skilled counselor will find exercises for the student to accomplish that validate these memories and relate them to potential occupation choices.
Stage 3: These patterns of vocation-related behaviors must then be checked-out by mentally creating ideal work roles and verbalizing what a fictitious day's activities would accomplish.
To be effective, small group or trusted partner interaction and verbalization of these roles, in a non-judgmental setting are important.
Creating additional intuitional day's activities help to generate new possibilities of careers to explore.
Stage 4: Reality comparison becomes the next task for students to confront.
A vast majority of American workers can be realistically grouped into several sets of familiar work environments.
It is highly likely that one of these occupation groupings will be a close match with the ideal work roles developed theoretically in stage 3.
Career assessments that were developed through satisfied-worker test results provide this matching technique.
If that test is also capable of accurately predicting the occupation group an individual worker is happily engaged in, the test has high validity.
A test to consider for this task is: careerfit-test.
The results can be skillfully compared to the stage 3 results through counselor and parent interaction.
Stage 5: A counselor may then involve the student in supplemental tests of work values, personality, educational and vocational aptitude to generate additional material to use in career choice discussion.
In addition, students could be assigned projects by interviewing workers from these preliminary, potential occupation groups.
Volunteer work, work/study positions or intern positions may be other assignments to gain better understanding of these potential work environments over an extended period.
Stage 6: Placement preparation comes next in the counseling process.
In some cases educational placement processes need experienced guidance assistance.
In other cases placement in paid or unpaid work environments require professional guidance assistance.
During this phase it is generally helpful to have a home-base group of peers meet together regularly.
During these small group sessions, an opportunity exists to report progress, receive coaching, and experience a mutual support system.
Invited professionals from the community, educational organizations and alumni body could also be valuable resources during this reality testing period.
As each student masters this six-step process, they can return to it again and again during their lifetime.
Futurists now predict that today's students will make between ten and twelve major career changes in life.
This is a good reason to be well prepared for change.
Your comments and suggestions are appreciated.
Therefore it can be defined.
By defining, it can be learned.
Learning and re-learning can become a habit.
Habit-forming should be the goal to be achieved by career counselors with every student.
Six distinct stages or plateaus form this long-term process, with three based on student-internal resources and the other three relying on resources external to the student.
Stage 1: The student displays an honest show of maturation, from being dependent to being an independent thinker regarding life-planning responsibility.
Research shows this psychological career maturation fully emerges at about age 23.
This is the age when 'choosing' changes to 'deciding'.
Without this conviction a student may not become owner of the planning process.
A "want to" rather than a "have to" attitude must prevail for a student to succeed, with career counselor assistance.
Stage 2: Because prior life experiences are developmentally influential, recall and discussion of them should become the planning platform.
With repeated guidance, students learn to examine the most pleasant among these past events to find the patterns of values, interests and skills they personally possess.
A skilled counselor will find exercises for the student to accomplish that validate these memories and relate them to potential occupation choices.
Stage 3: These patterns of vocation-related behaviors must then be checked-out by mentally creating ideal work roles and verbalizing what a fictitious day's activities would accomplish.
To be effective, small group or trusted partner interaction and verbalization of these roles, in a non-judgmental setting are important.
Creating additional intuitional day's activities help to generate new possibilities of careers to explore.
Stage 4: Reality comparison becomes the next task for students to confront.
A vast majority of American workers can be realistically grouped into several sets of familiar work environments.
It is highly likely that one of these occupation groupings will be a close match with the ideal work roles developed theoretically in stage 3.
Career assessments that were developed through satisfied-worker test results provide this matching technique.
If that test is also capable of accurately predicting the occupation group an individual worker is happily engaged in, the test has high validity.
A test to consider for this task is: careerfit-test.
The results can be skillfully compared to the stage 3 results through counselor and parent interaction.
Stage 5: A counselor may then involve the student in supplemental tests of work values, personality, educational and vocational aptitude to generate additional material to use in career choice discussion.
In addition, students could be assigned projects by interviewing workers from these preliminary, potential occupation groups.
Volunteer work, work/study positions or intern positions may be other assignments to gain better understanding of these potential work environments over an extended period.
Stage 6: Placement preparation comes next in the counseling process.
In some cases educational placement processes need experienced guidance assistance.
In other cases placement in paid or unpaid work environments require professional guidance assistance.
During this phase it is generally helpful to have a home-base group of peers meet together regularly.
During these small group sessions, an opportunity exists to report progress, receive coaching, and experience a mutual support system.
Invited professionals from the community, educational organizations and alumni body could also be valuable resources during this reality testing period.
As each student masters this six-step process, they can return to it again and again during their lifetime.
Futurists now predict that today's students will make between ten and twelve major career changes in life.
This is a good reason to be well prepared for change.
Your comments and suggestions are appreciated.
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