Careers Advisor Jobs | Training for Employment Officers

Would you like to work in careers counselling? Help people to follow their dreams and find the right job for them.

Employment opportunities are rapidly changing - in current times industries change, so jobs that didn't exist years ago now offer significant opportunities. As a careers counsellor, you can help people identify which job may suit them best, and what steps they can take to achieve the job of their dreams.

Careers Counselling involves more than just finding work for people.

Among other things, Careers Counselling may involve helping people:

identify the best job for their skills and interests
find any job to meet their personal and financial needs
find a better or more appropriate job for their situation
achieve job satisfaction through appropriate choices
plan and cope with career changes
better adapt to the workplace
improve their potential for advancement in the workplace
identify new career possibilities when circumstances change.

To be able to assist a client in each or any of these processes, a Careers Counsellor must be aware of :

the diverse nature of employment opportunities
the requirements for success in different types of jobs
reasons that people hire and fire employees
workplace conditions including contract law, industrial relations systems, health and safety issues, ethics- useful contacts among employers, government departments, funding bodies, professional associations, industry experts, etc
factors that hinder or promote a person’s job-seeking effectiveness
trends in the local job market.

A good Careers Counsellor must be impartial and objective.

Problem Solving with Clients

Since most of your clients may already feel that they have a problem, problem-solving may be an important part of your counselling. A problem-solving approach will also involve the client in identifying and working through his or her problems, thereby developing their skills and giving them a greater sense of involvement in the decision-making.

The keys to problem solving are:

Withhold judgement. Don’t make up your mind at the start what is the problem or who is responsible. Instead, adopt a learning and listening approach, and use careful questioning to encourage the client to identify the problem.
Identify the problem. This can be quite difficult, but it will help you and the client focus on the actual areas needing attention, rather on the feelings and opinions that result from it.
Establish the desire to solve the problem. Believe it or not, many people really do not want to solve a problem because it distracts attention from deeper problems. Or they may not have focused on solving the problem, but rather, expected it to resolve itself over time. One way is to ask the client to list all the negative outcomes of this problem, present and future, and to consider how much effort it is worth to solve it.
Consider possible strategies. Before focusing on a solution, it is helpful to consider all options, even some which seem, at first, to be poor options. Having many options gives you and the client a great deal more to work with than seeing only two choices – either do this or do that. You might need to patiently support a client through this stage, since they might have previously decided that there are only two options – this or that.
Select the best possible option, and also a second option, in case the first doesn’t work out. Weigh options against the time, effort, money, motivation, support and other resources needed. A perfect solution that the client cannot or will not commit to is worse than a lesser solution that the client will act upon.
Plan how to pursue the chosen option. Plan a course of action, beginning with what can be done right now, and what to do in contingencies. Every step in the plan should be lead towards the stated goal. Discourage the client from any action that is not essential to solving the identified problem. All related issues can be dealt with later.
Commit to the action. A schedule is helpful here, and a clear set of next steps that the client will carry out. Follow up to ensure that these are done, and discuss the pitfalls of procrastination.
Evaluate the strategy to see if it is achieving the desired results or a reasonable and acceptable alternative. The clients should be encouraged to evaluate their progress according to perceivable results and outcomes, even if these are felt results, like “I felt much more confident this time. Tomorrow, I will remind him of our conversation and make an appointment to discuss a new position”.