How do you promote career exploration and learning among your clients?

In addition to objective measures like inventories and tests, a career counselor will help someone give voice to the longings and dreams someone has and provide ideas for exploring and evaluating them. Often, listening to a person’s heart and soul is where they long to go. A good career counselor will listen for cues and notice breadcrumbs that are dropped.

I use the Strong Interest Inventory? combined with the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI)? to help clients compare their interests to their underlying strengths and areas where they may need to stretch based on their experiences and development. I don’t just hand them a report, though. We delve deeply into past experiences to find out where these interests develop. What did their parents expect from them? What role models do they have? What are their personal experiences with how they like to learn and work? I help clients evaluate whether their expectations are realistic, and help them move past what they think they should do and focus on what is the best fit for them.

As a career coach, my goal is to promote career exploration and learning among my clients by creating a supportive and engaging environment. I encourage clients to reflect on their passions, strengths, and values, helping them gain clarity about their career goals. Through personalized assessments and discussions, I guide them towards exploring various industries and job roles. By offering resources such as workshops, online courses, and networking opportunities, I empower clients to expand their knowledge and skill set. Together, we work on developing an actionable plan that fosters continuous learning and adaptability, enabling them to navigate their career journey with confidence.

One of my favourite exercises is to have my clients complete a drawing exercise - My World as it is now. I explain that it is not about creating a piece of art as such - but giving them an opportunity to view what's going on for them through a different lens. Especially as they answer a selection of questions to help them populate their drawing. Examples include: What is draining me currently? What is energising me? What am I particularly enjoying about my role? What am I grateful for?

A career counselor is a guide who helps job seekers get insights into their skills, knowledge, and personalities. Career counseling is like teaching. Instead of teaching a subject like history or math, a career counselor teaches job seekers how to get clarity about what they can do and, more importantly, what they want to do. To do so, the career counselor shares resources, such as assessment tests, books, videos, information about career platforms, etc. If you are a career counselor, you should stay up to date with new trends by reading recent publications, joining professional organizations, and connecting with other career counselors.

LinkedIn, where you’re reading right now, is IMHO the best source of advice and job openings, especially if you follow creators who are recruiters. O*net Online is a database of occupational titles, salaries and career outlooks. This is a good starting place, but at the same time, it’s important to watch the news to see if the career outlook is still current. Case in point: Massive layoffs in the tech sector have caused thousands of people to scramble for new jobs, while career databases may still show it’s a growing field when it is clearly contracting. Salary.com and Glassdoor are good to research salaries. Blogs from job sites can also provide insight, since they are designed to attract readers to their jobs websites.

I often use self-reflection and feedback to help clients discover a skill gap. If working with someone in an early career stage, I help them find a path to gain the necessary skills, training, and experience to advance their career in a purposeful direction. I don't particularly like to be the bearer of bad news, so if someone needs more skills or experience for their desired job, self-reflection and research activities can help the client draw this conclusion independently. Then, I encourage them and help them find creative ways to fill those gaps. Ultimately, I am helping them make decisions about short-term goals that support their long-term vision.

Once I know where on the RIASEC scale my clients are, I have them do exercises where they take lines from job descriptions and add and cross out things they like and dislike across different categories. This helps them custom-make an ideal job description, so they know how closely aligned they are with actual job descriptions. This allows us to look at data points and actively seek out positions that are a good match instead of just applying for jobs that show up on the feed.

Once a client has narrowed in on a couple of career directions, I recommend that they do informational interviews. This is an actionable step that requires a higher level of engagement and investment on the client's part. I suggest that they ask questions that can't be answered in a job description, like, "What do you wish someone had told you before you started this career?" Informational interviews have many benefits: 1) They help clients gather information. 2) They are great for networking and building professional contacts. 3) They can lead to paid work. 4) They can give the job seeker tips and be a roadmap to access a particular career. 5) They can ultimately help a client make a decision on whether or not to pursue that career.

It is really important that your career coach works to an ethical code of practice and that their practice is client-centred. In the UK, there is a register for suitably qualified Career Development Practitioners, which is available from the Career Development Institute, and so I would absolutely recommend that anyone considering using professional support with their career finds a practitioner from this register. A Career Development Practitioner will use a variety of techniques and methods based on theory and research to promote exploration and support the development of career management skills in their clients. Each client will require a different approach according to their needs which the practitioner will identify and work with.