LongGone wrote:I probably shouldn't generalize, but my experience is that guidance counselors are all too often the people who were found to be inadequate teachers and were shuffled into their current job as a results. They often have little or no real training in their job and make decisions on subjective information. There must be professionally trained and dedicated career counselors, but I never seemed to run across them.
Seems to me that it is a massive task to train a GOOD careers guidance person.
For starters they need to be a psychologist to read the body language, to really understand behind the veneer which the applicant puts up.
Next, with the applicant, they neeed to build up a map of what would make the applicant happy in life - not just any old degree but their core values. (To suggest but a tiny facet, is the person a risk taker, a big risk taker, a no-risk person; can they handle stress - a little, a lot, constant; do they want something routine/repetitive, something where they need to think, something where the outcome is stated and they have to work to it; do they want to be part of a crowd, a loner, a sometimes-company person................... .) My list must be 30 headings or more long.
That defines the final outcome and then one has the task of getting there - and a source of money is just one of a dozen or so different streams to follow That source of money is what we call a career and the guidance person has to know enough about the choice out there to refine the possibilities to the subject's personal view of happiness. Of course there is far far more to it than that, for example, what about when something doesn't work out? How does the person know when they have acheived that goal? Changing goals? ......
I think that learning to give such guidance is in itself worthy of a degree or higher.
dons armour and retreats
