What is career counseling?

What is career counseling?

There are a number of factors that influence your career development, including your interests, abilities, values, personality, background, and circumstances. Career Counseling is a process that will help you to know and understand yourself and the world of work in order to make career, educational, and life decisions.

the differences between a job, an occupation and a career are the following.

Job is a paid position, requiring a group of specific attributes and skills that enable a person to Perform tasks in an organization, either part –time or fulltime for a short or long duration. It is work conducted and exchanged for payment.

OCCUPATION is defined as a group of similar jobs found in different industries; it is more of an employment category.

CAREER involves the jobs or occupations (paid and unpaid) which one undertakes throughout a lifetime. A series of jobs/occupations help us to develop different skills and acquire knowledge in our career and progress towards higher level positions.

What do I need to consider?

 Education

 Goals

 Skills

 Vision

 Interests

 Values

Career development is more than just deciding on a major and what job you want to get when you graduate. It really is a lifelong process, meaning that throughout your life you will change, situations will change, and you will continually have to make career and life decisions.

Thus, Career Development is a “continuous lifelong process of developmental experiences that focuses on seeking, obtaining and processing information about self, occupational and educational alternatives, life styles and role options”

(Hansen, 1976) . Put another way, career development is the process through which people come to understand themselves as they relate to the world of work and their role in it.

Theories and research describing career behavior provide the “conceptual glue” for as well as describe where, when and for what purpose career counseling, career education, career guidance and other career interventions should be implemented.