Career counseling includes at least four working methods: labor market advice, career guidance, elements of coaching and elements of psychological counseling. Knowledge of personal finance and personal effectiveness can also be added to this list.
In short, career counseling is help with finding a job and building a career. There is just one nuance: a career consultant does not look for a job for you and does not do anything on your behalf; they teach you how to do it properly. Career counseling includes four main blocks:
1. Job search skills
This means the ability to write resumes and cover letters. To determine your value on the job market. To find vacancies, and not only those posted on job sites. Self-presentation skills, the ability to get through interviews and answer employers' “tough questions.” The ability to negotiate with employers at the final stages and stand up for your interests.
This block also includes labor market advice: information about the current state and development trends of the job market; about which professions are in demand and which less so; about the structures and opportunities for professional and career growth in different types of companies; about salary levels.
In this block it is very important to understand the subtle differences in what different companies and different participants in the process expect from candidates. For example, American companies will assess your results, Japanese ones your stability and loyalty to the company. For small private businesses the ability to work in conditions of uncertainty and lack of structure matters, while for multinational corporations it is the ability to follow procedures and respect hierarchy. HR specialists assess your motivation and how well your experience matches the requirements overall. For the hiring manager, the details of your experience, your professional skills and competencies, and your potential matter. The HR director will look at long-term career plans and how they fit the company's goals. And for an owner, what matters is the profit you will bring the company and your moral and ethical qualities.
This block answers the main question: “What is the best way to ‘package’ and sell your experience to an employer?” It matters for everyone who is actively job hunting, especially those who have not interviewed for a long time, who send out resumes and get no answer, who are not invited to second interviews, and who find it hard to present and sell themselves at meetings.
Job search skills are what “lies on the surface.” Clients' first requests are usually connected with them in one way or another. And of course job search skills are very important for professional fulfillment, but they are not the most important thing. You cannot just write a good resume and polish your self-presentation: if there is no solid ground under them (the candidate's motivation and fit with their long-term goals), they will not work.
2. Career planning
This is defining the direction of your career movement and drawing up a short-, medium- and long-term career plan that takes labor market trends into account. The main task of this block is to develop a career strategy that suits you best and meets the demands of the job market.
Career planning helps you move in the direction that is best for you and at the best speed for you. For example, the path from specialist to director does not suit everyone; some are more comfortable running a business; and for some people work is not a value at all, and living an interesting, full life and traveling matter more. A career plan lets you make hard decisions quickly and easily, such as which of two offers to choose, whether to change jobs, or what additional education to get.
Here is the catch with career planning: everyone knows a career needs planning, but few understand how to do it and, most importantly, why. The outdated approach is still common: “in a year I am a senior specialist, in three a department head, in 10 a director,” but it no longer works. First, a vertical career does not suit everyone. Second, the modern world changes fast, companies change their structure, and rigid long-term planning is impossible. Third, there are stages of psychological development and age-related crisis periods when values are reassessed. A career strategy can change a lot with the birth of children or after a midlife crisis, and you should not cling to a goal set 15 years ago if it has lost its relevance. In addition, career planning must take into account career cycles, which are individual for each person: some need a new round of growth every five years, others every six months.
The “career planning” block also includes an external aspect: labor market trends. Your career plans and aspirations may change over time, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you must clearly understand where the market is heading and how to stay in demand both five and 10 years from now. But if you plan your career based on the “rules of the game” of 20 years ago, that is a crime! The way our parents and grandparents built their careers has lost relevance completely. The market will gently warn you a few times, but if you do not take action, it will simply throw you overboard.
3. Career guidance and finding your calling
This block helps identify inclinations, talents and interests. Interest is the key factor in successful career development; without interest you cannot succeed in a profession, no matter how much effort you put in. As for abilities and talents, my view is that they are secondary and interest is primary: it lets you do something for a long time, and that is how abilities appear. This is the scientifically derived “10,000-hour rule.”
There is an old Soviet approach to career guidance: every person must choose one professional field, once and for all. It has a number of drawbacks. The first is that people divide into experts and managers. Experts really do find it fairly easy to choose a field that interests them and to stay with it, if not for life, then for quite a long time. Managers, on the other hand, love organizing processes, leading people and doing strategic planning. They usually become leaders fairly early and start their own businesses. But it matters less to them which field exactly they work in. So it is far from possible to determine a specific professional field for everyone, let alone choose it for life.
In career guidance it is also important to identify professional motivation. For some, for example, recognition matters more than a high income, and for others the chance to work with their hands is dearer than career growth. This is all very individual, depends on a particular person's value system, and affects career strategy.
Well-done career guidance helps you choose the right field, type of employment and type of company, plan your career properly and follow your own career path. And also to change professional field relatively easily, quickly and painlessly if a wrong choice was made at some point.
4. Psychological barriers
If at the previous level we work on the question “Where to work?”, at this level we work on the question “What gets in the way of working there?” In my experience there is not a single person who does not know what they want to do. The difficulties lie either in not knowing HOW to do it (in 10% of cases at most) or, in the majority (90%), the real problem is that the person is AFRAID to do it: it seems silly, wrong, poorly paid, not promising and so on.
It is very painful to see a talented teacher working as an accountant because they think teachers earn little. Or an engineer by temperament suffering in a sales manager role. Or a person who is a natural manager not developing as a leader because as a child they were told that “being a boss” is bad.
Unfortunately, such difficulties cannot always be solved at the previous three levels. You have surely seen people who are interested in something and even know what to do to make it their profession, but do not do it. Writing a beautiful resume, information about labor market trends or a career guidance test will not change the situation. In such cases, among other things, you need to work with psychological barriers: fears and negative beliefs. This matters because fears and beliefs affect your whole life (not only professional) outside our awareness. And it often happens that when one such fear or belief is neutralized, all the other obstacles fall away by themselves.
When a person believes in themselves and their success, everything becomes possible for them, even what no one has done before!