Job-hunting often gets described as a job in itself. Equally daunting is changing career paths after spending years working in a single industry.
Career counseling is essential because counselors work with their clients to make the process less daunting and more enjoyable, even exciting.
How Career Counseling Services Can Help
Career counseling services offer clients various ways of furthering their career change or job search. This is important since the experience can feel amorphous and even out-of-focus when people attempt it on their own.
Career counseling services can help by:
- Setting SMART goals
- Assessing strengths and weaknesses
- Offering skill-building courses
- Providing job search help and insights
Setting SMART Goals
Left to their own devices, the average person sets goals that are vague and even unattainable.
SMART goals do the opposite. They’re goals designed to be achieved. The acronym stands for:
- Specific
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Sometimes the “T” is listed as tangible. Either way, a good career counselor helps their client create realistic and attainable goals. This matters because it alleviates the sense many have that their career search is drifting or without focus.
What SMART goals do that distinguishes them from more vague goals is break down the steps they need to take to achieve the aspirations of the goal-setter.
Career Counseling and Story Building
The SMART acronym doesn’t only have to apply to goals. The other way career counseling services use it is to help clients create interview stories.
Consequently, when a client gets to an interview, they present at their best because instead of rambling indefinitely, career counseling helps them shape stories and anecdotes with a focus. Candidates using the SMART construct to tell stories seem more cogent and better-prepared than those who don’t.
Career Counselors Can Assess Strengths and Weaknesses
Another way career counseling services help clients is by giving them a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone has a sense of what they’re good at, but not everyone is equally comfortable boasting about it. Career counseling services help highlight a person’s skill sets and accomplishments to the best effect.
Additionally, career counseling services offer tests to help get an impression of the skills of an individual. This helps tap into the talents a person might be unaware of while also giving the career counselor a better sense of what job would suit each person.
Career Counseling and Offering Skill Building Courses
Everyone has accomplishments, but sometimes the career someone aspires to requires extra skill. It’s not always one that person already exhibits, either.
When people career-search on their own, the tendency is to exclude jobs that need a skill they don’t have. Partly that’s because learning new things can be daunting, but it’s also because not everyone has equal access to the resources to learn that skill in the first place.
Career counseling services close that gap. Often they have access to auxiliary courses clients can take to open up new career paths. Courses vary but might include:
- Health and hygiene
- Computer coding
- Healthy child development
And if the career counseling service can’t offer the particular course needed, there’s a strong likelihood the service can connect the client with someone who can.
Career Counseling and Providing Job Search Help
Finally, career counseling can help by giving clients ways to research and search for new or different careers.
The internet revolutionized the job-hunting process, but it also made the search much more challenging than it used to be. A career counseling service can offer not only job-hunting resources but show people how to use them.
Conclusion
Finding a new job or switching to a new career can be a daunting task without help. Many people find they flounder, lose focus, or simply aren’t successful on their own.
But a career counseling service can help eliminate that challenge by working with people to set more attainable goals and find the job that suits them best.
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