Counseling generally involves two individuals. The Counselor: the one provides the ability to understand viz. an issue or a set objective to help develop the ability to decide on the ways and means to achieve an objective. The Counseled: the one who is facilitated by the Counselor to clearly understand the way to resolve issues and difficulties faced and find out the ways to achieve ones goal or objective.
Our focus is generally on issues such as career exploration, career change, personal career development and other career or livelihood related issues. Typically when people come for career or employment related counseling they know exactly what they want to get out of the process, but are unsure about how it will work
Let us now focus on the two basic forms of counseling that are effective for the prospective trainees as well as the trainees we interact with while explaining to them the various Livelihood Training programme that will be appropriate for them. At times, while training them on specific skill sets under Livelihood Training Programmes, we need to counsel them on how to remain focused on their training objective. We too need to counsel the team members to meet the common functional objective of the team.
(A) Career Counseling:
This is useful while counseling candidates from educational institutions or those who seem quite aware and are trying to develop their career or striving for appropriate means of livelihood.
Career counselors work with people from all walks of life such as adolescents trying to explore career options or with experienced professionals looking for a career change. Career counselors typically have a background in psychology, vocational psychology, or industrial/organizational psychology.
Each and every counselor has his/her unique way of counseling, but generally they generally use one or more ways to find out the interest, ability and aptitude of those they are helping in deciding on career options or appropriate means of livelihood. These assessments typically include: interest inventories, cognitive ability tests to find out the level of formal education i.e. school, pre-university, college or other levels of formal education, and personality assessments i.e. self assessment or behavioral traits such as integrity, Kindness, responsibility, determination, team work, etc.
Interest Inventories:
An interest inventory is a self assessment tool, used in career planning, that assesses one's likes and dislikes of a variety of activities, objects, and types of persons; the premise is that people in the same career (and satisfied in that career) have similar interests.
Examples:
· Ramana, who is aspiring to be a sales executive has listed his hobbies as making friends, traveling, learning languages, etc and the successful sales professionals have similar interests and their job description mentions that they need to get new clients and develop good client relationship. They need to travel to meet clients and make business deals with people who are located in distant places.
· Reshmi, who is a young Indian village girl, but is very shy by nature yet wants to work in the BPO industry has a very good voice and likes to sing, can play the harmonium and easily works on its keys and is good in accounting work; therefore shows all the interest and potential to be groomed into a successful Executive in BPO industry
Career counseling basically consists of four elements:
(a) Helping individuals to gain greater self-awareness in areas such as interests, values, abilities, and personality style.
(b) Helping individuals to gain opportunity awareness by connecting individuals to resources so that they can become more knowledgeable about jobs and occupations.
(c) Through job search engaging students in the decision-making process in order that they can choose a career path that is well suited to their own interests, values, abilities and personality style, and
(d) Through self-assessment assist individuals to be active managers of their career paths (including managing career transitions and balancing various life roles) as well as becoming lifelong learners in the sense of professional development over the lifespan.
Following is the detailed Checklist of the four basic steps of Career Counseling activity:
Checklist of Career Counseling Steps
The Checklist
Self-awareness:
1. What are my values?
2. What are my skills and abilities?
3. What are my interests?
4. What is my personality style?
5. What other life roles are important along with my job or occupation?
6. What are the family and cultural influences on my career path?
Opportunity-awareness:
1. What kinds of occupations and jobs am I suited for?
2. How much do I know about these different fields (job description, amount of pay, working conditions, opportunity for advancement, whether there is a demand for this field, the types of tasks performed, etc.)?
3. What are my options (possibilities: further study/training, work shadowing/ work experience/ volunteer work as a stepping stone towards long-term employment)?
4. What are my short-term and long-term goals?
5. How do I make decisions about these options?
6. Provide all necessary information on options available as professional training programmes that can help the individual to avail livelihood opportunities available according to his/her interest and aptitude.
Job search (How to prepare oneself for it):
Explain to the individual how Professional Training Programme will help him/her:
1. How do I prepare my resume and Job Application letter?
2. What do I need to know about attending a job interview?
3. How to search for employment opportunities? Contact potential employers to provide employment opportunities after the individual completes the professional training programme.
4. How to prepare oneself for career in the chosen industry’s specific domains viz. Customer Service in Retail industry.
Self Assessment
Self assessment is an important step in career planning process. It is the process of gathering information about oneself in order to make an informed career decision and plan and progress on the career path by regularly updating thus information. A self assessment should include a look at the following: values, interests, personality, and skills.
When you are able to clarify your own interests, values and skills then you can understand better about jobs/ careers which are a good match for you and those which are not. When you are well-matched to the career/ job you are likely to be more motivated and successful in your work, and would enjoy the job more than the person who is poorly suited for the same. That is why self awareness is so critical for successful career counseling.
An effective counselor helps a job aspirant in Self Assessment and guides the individual to Appropriate Livelihood (related Skill) Development Training Programme, if necessary, while enabling the individual to plan his/her career.
Individual Character Awareness is very important and Interest Inventory also has six basic character traits:
1. Kindness
2. Integrity
3. Community Existence
4. Determination
5. Responsibility
6. Respect
Based in part on the “Six Pillars of Character,” these traits are seen as cornerstones of good character and are necessary for social progress—regardless of one’s religious beliefs or cultural background. The Character Development Scale (CDS) allows individuals to explore their character development by rating how well actions and attributes tied to these six traits apply to them and this helps in their career development and advancement too.
(B) Solution Based Counseling:
This is useful while counseling candidates from slums, villages and other rural areas.
The counselor uses respectful curiosity to invite the candidate to envision their preferred future and then counselor and candidate start attending to any moves towards it whether these are small increments or large changes. To support this, questions are asked about the candidate’s story, strengths and resources, and about exceptions to the problem, seeking employment or means of livelihood.
Solution focused counselor believes that change is constant. By helping people identify the things that they wish to have change in their life and also to attend to those things that are currently happening that they wish to continue happening, Counselor helps the candidate form a concrete vision of a happy future for themselves through self development and livelihood opportunity available through various Livelihood/Career Development Programmes. The counselor then helps the candidate to identify an appropriate livelihood programme that will help to progress towards the desired future. Through many success stories of candidates with similar profile who have succeeded in charting the course for their life. Get such candidates to share their success stories with the job aspirants as that will boost latter’s hope and confidence. Through this exercise, the counselor can motivate the job aspirants to overcome their failures and help them plan and move towards their goal. In this way, the counselor helps the candidate devise methods to analyse the problems they face and draw up a solution to overcome them. Thus counselor helps the candidates move towards the preferred future they have identified.
Solution focused counseling can be seen as a way of working that focuses exclusively or predominantly at two things:
1) Supporting people to explore their preferred futures.
2) Exploring when, where, with whom and how pieces of that preferred future are already happening.
Coping Questions
Coping questions are designed to elicit information about candidate's available resources that will help the candidate to decide on the livelihood/career along with the required training programme(s) and how to organize finances for executing his/her career plans. Counselor should help the candidate to organize and cope with the available resources to avail to help the candidate develop required knowledge/skill specific to the chosen profession. "It is really nice to see how you are coping with your existing resources to travel from your village to come and meet me. Let me help you see how you can work out your joining one of the Livelihood programmes and in successfully getting a job at the end of it!"
Genuine curiosity and admiration can help to highlight strengths without appearing to contradict the candidate's view of reality. The initial summary "I can see that things have been really difficult for you" is for them true and validates their story. The second part "you manage to join the programme.", is also a true, but one that counters the problem focused narrative. Undeniably, they cope and coping questions start to gently and supportively challenge the objections raised by a candidate to joining a livelihood programme.
Problem Free Talk
Problem free talk is often over looked as a technique. In Solution focused counseling, it is thought to be a useful technique for eliciting resources. Many people do leisure activities that relax them, or have experiences of being assertive, and many other useful resources that can help. The counselor can also gather information on the candidate`s values and beliefs and their strengths. From this discussion during the counseling session the counselor can use these strengths and resources to help the candidate decide and confirm his/her joining appropriate livelihood programme. For example; if a candidate finds it difficult to convince his/her parent or is not free with parents to take their consent to join the programme then get a meeting with the parents organized through the candidate.
Checklist of Support and Materials needed during Counseling
1. Venue in the form of a comfortable place where two people can comfortably sit and talk to each other.
2. A note pad and a writing pen for the counselor to take notes while speaking to the candidate
3. Drinking water
4. Adequate fresh air and light
5. Information Materials on various career options available.
6. Information on financial assistance available to meet the professional training/education expenses.
7. Materials for Aptitude test or such assessments.
8. Information on the Industry Clients and domains and career opportunities in them.
9. Counseling log book to maintain candidate wise records for case studies.
Important
· It is important to counsel that parents and guardians of the candidates when counseling the candidates to various livelihood programmes Counsel the parents during the mid-term assessment of the trainees.
· Counsel the parents on how they can participate in the process of their child’s career planning & development.
Our focus is generally on issues such as career exploration, career change, personal career development and other career or livelihood related issues. Typically when people come for career or employment related counseling they know exactly what they want to get out of the process, but are unsure about how it will work
Let us now focus on the two basic forms of counseling that are effective for the prospective trainees as well as the trainees we interact with while explaining to them the various Livelihood Training programme that will be appropriate for them. At times, while training them on specific skill sets under Livelihood Training Programmes, we need to counsel them on how to remain focused on their training objective. We too need to counsel the team members to meet the common functional objective of the team.
(A) Career Counseling:
This is useful while counseling candidates from educational institutions or those who seem quite aware and are trying to develop their career or striving for appropriate means of livelihood.
Career counselors work with people from all walks of life such as adolescents trying to explore career options or with experienced professionals looking for a career change. Career counselors typically have a background in psychology, vocational psychology, or industrial/organizational psychology.
Each and every counselor has his/her unique way of counseling, but generally they generally use one or more ways to find out the interest, ability and aptitude of those they are helping in deciding on career options or appropriate means of livelihood. These assessments typically include: interest inventories, cognitive ability tests to find out the level of formal education i.e. school, pre-university, college or other levels of formal education, and personality assessments i.e. self assessment or behavioral traits such as integrity, Kindness, responsibility, determination, team work, etc.
Interest Inventories:
An interest inventory is a self assessment tool, used in career planning, that assesses one's likes and dislikes of a variety of activities, objects, and types of persons; the premise is that people in the same career (and satisfied in that career) have similar interests.
Examples:
· Ramana, who is aspiring to be a sales executive has listed his hobbies as making friends, traveling, learning languages, etc and the successful sales professionals have similar interests and their job description mentions that they need to get new clients and develop good client relationship. They need to travel to meet clients and make business deals with people who are located in distant places.
· Reshmi, who is a young Indian village girl, but is very shy by nature yet wants to work in the BPO industry has a very good voice and likes to sing, can play the harmonium and easily works on its keys and is good in accounting work; therefore shows all the interest and potential to be groomed into a successful Executive in BPO industry
Career counseling basically consists of four elements:
(a) Helping individuals to gain greater self-awareness in areas such as interests, values, abilities, and personality style.
(b) Helping individuals to gain opportunity awareness by connecting individuals to resources so that they can become more knowledgeable about jobs and occupations.
(c) Through job search engaging students in the decision-making process in order that they can choose a career path that is well suited to their own interests, values, abilities and personality style, and
(d) Through self-assessment assist individuals to be active managers of their career paths (including managing career transitions and balancing various life roles) as well as becoming lifelong learners in the sense of professional development over the lifespan.
Following is the detailed Checklist of the four basic steps of Career Counseling activity:
Checklist of Career Counseling Steps
The Checklist
Self-awareness:
1. What are my values?
2. What are my skills and abilities?
3. What are my interests?
4. What is my personality style?
5. What other life roles are important along with my job or occupation?
6. What are the family and cultural influences on my career path?
Opportunity-awareness:
1. What kinds of occupations and jobs am I suited for?
2. How much do I know about these different fields (job description, amount of pay, working conditions, opportunity for advancement, whether there is a demand for this field, the types of tasks performed, etc.)?
3. What are my options (possibilities: further study/training, work shadowing/ work experience/ volunteer work as a stepping stone towards long-term employment)?
4. What are my short-term and long-term goals?
5. How do I make decisions about these options?
6. Provide all necessary information on options available as professional training programmes that can help the individual to avail livelihood opportunities available according to his/her interest and aptitude.
Job search (How to prepare oneself for it):
Explain to the individual how Professional Training Programme will help him/her:
1. How do I prepare my resume and Job Application letter?
2. What do I need to know about attending a job interview?
3. How to search for employment opportunities? Contact potential employers to provide employment opportunities after the individual completes the professional training programme.
4. How to prepare oneself for career in the chosen industry’s specific domains viz. Customer Service in Retail industry.
Self Assessment
Self assessment is an important step in career planning process. It is the process of gathering information about oneself in order to make an informed career decision and plan and progress on the career path by regularly updating thus information. A self assessment should include a look at the following: values, interests, personality, and skills.
When you are able to clarify your own interests, values and skills then you can understand better about jobs/ careers which are a good match for you and those which are not. When you are well-matched to the career/ job you are likely to be more motivated and successful in your work, and would enjoy the job more than the person who is poorly suited for the same. That is why self awareness is so critical for successful career counseling.
An effective counselor helps a job aspirant in Self Assessment and guides the individual to Appropriate Livelihood (related Skill) Development Training Programme, if necessary, while enabling the individual to plan his/her career.
Individual Character Awareness is very important and Interest Inventory also has six basic character traits:
1. Kindness
2. Integrity
3. Community Existence
4. Determination
5. Responsibility
6. Respect
Based in part on the “Six Pillars of Character,” these traits are seen as cornerstones of good character and are necessary for social progress—regardless of one’s religious beliefs or cultural background. The Character Development Scale (CDS) allows individuals to explore their character development by rating how well actions and attributes tied to these six traits apply to them and this helps in their career development and advancement too.
(B) Solution Based Counseling:
This is useful while counseling candidates from slums, villages and other rural areas.
The counselor uses respectful curiosity to invite the candidate to envision their preferred future and then counselor and candidate start attending to any moves towards it whether these are small increments or large changes. To support this, questions are asked about the candidate’s story, strengths and resources, and about exceptions to the problem, seeking employment or means of livelihood.
Solution focused counselor believes that change is constant. By helping people identify the things that they wish to have change in their life and also to attend to those things that are currently happening that they wish to continue happening, Counselor helps the candidate form a concrete vision of a happy future for themselves through self development and livelihood opportunity available through various Livelihood/Career Development Programmes. The counselor then helps the candidate to identify an appropriate livelihood programme that will help to progress towards the desired future. Through many success stories of candidates with similar profile who have succeeded in charting the course for their life. Get such candidates to share their success stories with the job aspirants as that will boost latter’s hope and confidence. Through this exercise, the counselor can motivate the job aspirants to overcome their failures and help them plan and move towards their goal. In this way, the counselor helps the candidate devise methods to analyse the problems they face and draw up a solution to overcome them. Thus counselor helps the candidates move towards the preferred future they have identified.
Solution focused counseling can be seen as a way of working that focuses exclusively or predominantly at two things:
1) Supporting people to explore their preferred futures.
2) Exploring when, where, with whom and how pieces of that preferred future are already happening.
Coping Questions
Coping questions are designed to elicit information about candidate's available resources that will help the candidate to decide on the livelihood/career along with the required training programme(s) and how to organize finances for executing his/her career plans. Counselor should help the candidate to organize and cope with the available resources to avail to help the candidate develop required knowledge/skill specific to the chosen profession. "It is really nice to see how you are coping with your existing resources to travel from your village to come and meet me. Let me help you see how you can work out your joining one of the Livelihood programmes and in successfully getting a job at the end of it!"
Genuine curiosity and admiration can help to highlight strengths without appearing to contradict the candidate's view of reality. The initial summary "I can see that things have been really difficult for you" is for them true and validates their story. The second part "you manage to join the programme.", is also a true, but one that counters the problem focused narrative. Undeniably, they cope and coping questions start to gently and supportively challenge the objections raised by a candidate to joining a livelihood programme.
Problem Free Talk
Problem free talk is often over looked as a technique. In Solution focused counseling, it is thought to be a useful technique for eliciting resources. Many people do leisure activities that relax them, or have experiences of being assertive, and many other useful resources that can help. The counselor can also gather information on the candidate`s values and beliefs and their strengths. From this discussion during the counseling session the counselor can use these strengths and resources to help the candidate decide and confirm his/her joining appropriate livelihood programme. For example; if a candidate finds it difficult to convince his/her parent or is not free with parents to take their consent to join the programme then get a meeting with the parents organized through the candidate.
Checklist of Support and Materials needed during Counseling
1. Venue in the form of a comfortable place where two people can comfortably sit and talk to each other.
2. A note pad and a writing pen for the counselor to take notes while speaking to the candidate
3. Drinking water
4. Adequate fresh air and light
5. Information Materials on various career options available.
6. Information on financial assistance available to meet the professional training/education expenses.
7. Materials for Aptitude test or such assessments.
8. Information on the Industry Clients and domains and career opportunities in them.
9. Counseling log book to maintain candidate wise records for case studies.
Important
· It is important to counsel that parents and guardians of the candidates when counseling the candidates to various livelihood programmes Counsel the parents during the mid-term assessment of the trainees.
· Counsel the parents on how they can participate in the process of their child’s career planning & development.
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