This is How Right Career Counselling Looks Like
A counsellor’s knowledge, skills and expertise are, of course, important. However, it is equally important for a counselor to foster trust. If you feel you are at great comfort in sharing everything to the best of your knowledge, it’s going right. If you feel your counsellor understands you well, understands your vision and your goals, it is going right.
However, if you are reluctant to have interactions with your counsellor or share information, you might want to rethink. Just like you should not hide anything from your doctor about your case, you should not hide anything from your career counsellor. But then it all comes down to whether your counselor inspires that trust in you and pays active attention when you speak to them.
Some will go for mechatronics, some will go for prompt engineering, some will go for civil engineering and so on. Similarly, someone might want to pursue manufacturing engineering or something as unique as textile engineering.
It is for the counselor to understand your unique path and guide you through it with the highest degree of personalization. There cannot be a ‘one approach fits all’ thing in career counselling. Isn’t it?
Having said that, it is for you to understand and gauge how much personalization your counselor brings to the table.
If you learn better through short tutorials than long MOOCs, the counsellor must make that adjustment. If you are more inclined to doing public speaking activities than essay writing competitions, your counsellor is pushing you for, they must make the adjustment. They should be flexible enough to improvise and adapt.
Another important factor in judging the effectiveness of your career counsellor is how transparent your counsellor is. Is there any information that your counselor holds back or are they transparent enough to share all details with you?
Transparency is the key to effective counselling and trust building. Irrespective of whether the odds are in your favour or not, the counsellor must explain with great transparency. A counselor’s transparent, honest and well-informed guidance can be cardinal to your career success. On the other hand, selective sharing of information or opaqueness can lead you in the wrong direction.
A simple measure of great counselling is that you have a clear understanding of all processes and application timelines. Your counsellor should help you understand how university applications will work, the turnaround time and what is important for the process. There should not be any sort of misunderstanding or confusion when it comes to your understanding of it.
This, of course, will depend on the counsellor’s knowledge and expertise in terms of processes, timelines and documentation.
A career counsellor is also a mentor and a guiding light for you. A career counsellor should always encourage you to believe that you’re capable of achieving much more than you ever knew. As a mentor, your counsellor should push you to achieve more, to do more and to challenge your comfort zone. For instance, your counsellor should not only push you for admissions to top universities but also to bag study abroad scholarships.
If your counsellor does that, be grateful! It takes the heart of a true mentor to go out of the way to push you to do more.
However, if your counsellor is happy to make you settle for less or give you the impression that you can’t do more, it’s concerning. You might not be under the right guidance then.
To encapsulate, effective career counselling is vital for students to navigate uncertain times across the career landscape. I want to stress the importance of the term ‘effective’ here, for your counsellor’s efficiency is directly linked to your future success. The above signs will certainly help you to understand if your career counselling is going great or not. Even if you are yet to start your career counselling journey, this blog helps you to choose wisely.
Author Bio : Silver Fern
silverfern@gmail.com
