A person's interests, beliefs, skills, attitude, experience, and circumstances are the factors that affect personal growth, and that's where career counseling plays a vital role. Let's generally talk about the word 'counseling'. It is a comprehensive term that refers to the process of helping a person by providing support and guidance and exploring the solutions being faced. The term is associated with a professional helping out an individual in need. This is the professional who understands human behavior and personality and knows how to guide them to provide the right path. These professionals can reach out to you in times of uncertainty and ensure that your problems and identity remain confidential.
The relationship between a counselor and counselee is based on trust. This article will discuss career counseling, why students need counseling, and why it is essential for them.
What Is Career Counseling?
Career counseling is an essential part of academic and overall growth. However, sometimes career counseling is ignored by a large number of students. But students and their parents need to understand that career counseling is professional advice on a student's career path based on their academic performance, interest, and aptitude. Moreover, there are various career choices to choose from, which adds further confusion. However, career counseling allows students to understand their prospects and act according to them. To understand career counseling correctly, let us discuss some essential elements.
● A qualified career counselor-
An authentic counselor is the root of correct guidance, which is why it is essential to any career counseling process. These are psychology experts, meaning they hold at least a postgraduate degree in Psychology/Applied Psychology or a diploma in Counseling Psychology. Career counselors who guide fields such as engineering, management, and hospitality must be experts in the concerned realm. A great career counselor is a problem solver, a sharp listener and observer, and has adequate knowledge of different fields to guide your career decisions.
● A secure environment-
The whole process of career counseling involves developing a secure and safe environment where the students can feel at ease and freely discuss their careers without any hesitation. Along with this secure environment, the assurance of confidentiality of the information shared by the students is also necessary.
● An understanding of trust and confidence-
The career counseling process is based on trust and confidence between the counselor and the student. To help them with their better career choice, a counselor sometimes talks about their emotional and developmental issues that seem to be stressful. The student and the parent need to have faith in the counselor.
Who Needs Career Counseling and When?
The perfect age to seek career counseling for students is between 13-17 years, i.e. 8th standard to 12th standard. This is the time when major changes take place in a student's life in terms of physical and emotional. These changes include transitioning from school to college and trying to fit in with time. It is the peak time when career decisions are made. That's why students need counseling to get in the right direction. Most parents are actively involved in shaping their child's career; 51% of Indian parents' priority is their child's financial success.
In addition, parents also follow a hands-on approach when it comes to making career decisions for their children. However, sometimes it works, but many times it does not. But we must remember that every kid is different and unique, so it becomes difficult for parents or teachers to always acknowledge a child's strengths or weaknesses and their passions or dislikes. This is why career counseling is essential.
Importance of Career Counseling For Students:
All the students need career guidance at some point in their lives, which helps them get insights about themselves, their careers and what they can do to improve. Mentioned below are some benefits that career counseling can offer students.
● It helps to pick the right career-
Career counselors are experts at assessing a student's aptitude, interest, personality, and other aspects. They use this assessment to suggest the best career options from all the available and relevant options.
● It provides expert resources-
Career counseling provides access to a career expert's resources and knowledge. This knowledge of careers, their scope, and the paths to pursue them are most important from the view of a parent and child, but most of the time, parents or guardians do not have that knowledge.
● Career counseling helps to gain confidence-
Career counseling helps a counselee understand the hurdles in their career path, which helps to develop the confidence to overcome them. An excellent counselor's job is to provide insight and confidence to the student.
● It helps to change unwanted behavior patterns-
Students have habits that are hard to break, such as not keeping updates on the latest developments in their selected career paths, ignoring mental and emotional health, not trying to self-motivate and so on. In this situation, career counseling helps break such behavioral patterns that lead to unproductive activities at home or in school/college.
● Career counselling helps to take off career-related frustration-
Selecting a career can be a challenging task for both students and parents. In addition, a lack of any source of blunting out emotions and thoughts can add up to the current frustration. Career counseling provides a platform where such frustration can be decreased and focus on choosing the best career option.
● It provides a role model-
Career counseling helps students connect to experts who have enough experience to share. They are role models who have already achieved much and helped others in their life. That is why career aspiration can act as an inspiration to those who need it.
● Career counseling brings stability to thoughts-
Career counseling can help you remain calm when deciding on your career. It helps to bring focus and maintain it throughout the activities. With proper planning, a counselor can make your life more organized.
Final Thoughts:
Career counseling helps students set realistic expectations by helping them plan their interests with the correct career path. Today, more students are concerned about their career choice, and the need and demand for career counseling are at an all-time high. Remember, a career is the most critical aspect of an individual's life, so you must choose it wisely.
Author Bio:
Robert Macro is an educated and well-known author who gets his inspiration from learners and their related hardships and endeavors to fix them. Also, he is functioning on developing pupil forums and services associated with platforms like assignments help lite aspiring to assist scholars in resolving their assignments and academic writing issues.
