You may decide that you need career counselling to help with choosing a new role or even leaving the one that you are in currently. Useful at any time in life, career counselling is not only suitable for those about to enter the work field; with your working life taking up so much of your time, it is important to get it right and working with an experienced career counsellor can help.
Making carefully considered decisions
Whatever your age or career status, making a job move can be stressful. Your career counsellor can help by taking the strain and working with you to make carefully considered decisions, putting you on the right path towards a job that will not only make you happy but also provide you with sufficient income. If you think about it, we spend about a third of our life at work so if we are not happy and our job is causing us to feel anxious or depressed, finding the right career is very important when it comes to our feeling of contentment.
Your career counselling therapist will have been trained in order to provide you with plenty of resources and discussion time to look at your aptitude, ability and preferences. Their aim will be to take you forward to a place whereby you can find the right first career, change to another sector or even give up work and do something else to earn a living. If you are feeling unhappy, disillusioned and stressed about your position, finding a job that is the perfect fit is not an easy task. This is why you need a career counsellor in order to find your way through the vast amount of career choices before you and find the most suitable position for you, even if it is hard to find.
Career counselling questions
You can expect to be asked a lot of questions by your career counsellor, including some of the following:
- What sort of things do you like doing when you are not at work?
- What are you good at? Do you have any natural talents or skills?
- What is your current skill set?
- What qualifications do you have?
- Does your career need to involve you making a minimum salary?
- How does your location fit with your career choice?
- Do you want to re-locate or travel?
- What is important to you in life and what are your values?
- Do you like working with people and helping others?
- Does your work need to challenge you or do you prefer something that is not so taxing?
- Is stability and security important to you?
Your career counsellor will take the time to examine and explore your skills and strengths, levels of education, interests and personality. Tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator may be used in order to help you determine which types of careers best match with your personality.
If you like your current job but it is just not coming up to scratch, your career counsellor may even be able to come up with ideas as to how you can improve your present position. This might involve such things as asking for promotion, negotiating a better salary or even moving to a different department.
