The new world of work is so radically different than what parents experienced that getting expert advice on potential career paths is vital at any age. Usually, our career counselling is done in conjunction with college choice, particularly as parents consider the investment they are making to fund college.
The Career Issue Is Even Bigger Than CollegeAs parents, you are understandably focused on the next step. College is the transition to adulthood for your children. That’s why it is a big deal. College, as significant as it is, is 4 years. Those 4 years create an enormous impact years later. Nonetheless, careers span 40 years plus. The career is issue is so big that The Learning Consultants has created a subsidiary: Career Counseling Connecticut as well as a career development site Career Path of Abundance to focus exclusively on career counseling. For those who are post-college, our career counseling resources are deeper within that entity.
If you are about to invest several hundred thousand dollars in college and part (or a large part) of that decision relates to career preparation, then meeting with an expert career counselor is your best chance of ensuring return on your investment.
For those of you who are parents of students either entering college and trying to help your almost adult child figure out a course of study or have a child in college and are trying to help them figure out what to do post college, you are in the right place.
Consider the enormous amount of time, energy, and money you have put into your children to ensure they end up at the right college. Well done! The importance of college as the transition to adulthood for those fortunate enough is vital.
But, the world has shifted. Dramatically.
The old paradigm: send your children to college and trust that they will figure out what to do for their career.
The majority of your generation followed this path and until the mid 2000s this course of action probably turned out reasonably well.
But, that model is pre-economic transformation.
As before, most enter college with little knowledge about the work world and their skills, personality, and values in relation to how they might fit into the work world. And, many do little to figure out these issues during college.
So what goes on in college? Surely, you remember! This current generation might be among the last that indulges in the college experience of high social immersion and minimal career exploration and training.
The result: more than half of all college students take longer than four years to graduate, largely because they switch majors or transfer or simply meander through college without a distinct plan. And, more than half of all college graduates boomerang back home.
We provide an outside, objective, resource to provide actionable career counseling advice on college majors, programs of study, and best possible career paths for our clients to follow.
Daryl Capuano’s recent book, Career Path of Abundance, also addresses the career issue:
Parents who are about to spend $100-250,000 on college realize that they should care about the investment outcome of college as much as the admission to college.
The economy might be reason number one.
But, the lack of competent career counselling for high school students is reason number two.
At best, Connecticut high students are provided with guidebooks on careers and a 1970s style inventory of skills and interests with potential career matches.
I recently had a student from East Lyme High School who was told “You like math. Consider engineering.”
That’s not necessarily bad advice. Engineering is certainly an area that I would steer students toward, not away, but in the case of this student, engineering was likely a mismatch.
But, this student had a highly extroverted personality and a preference for making decisions based on emotion more than analysis. Both of these attributes might make engineering a non-fit.
In addition, most career counselors simply have not kept up with the cutting edge industries that have transformed the work place. The new world of work has created industries, jobs, and career paths that are simply different than even a decade ago. Some of our clients have come to us after telling their past career counselor that search engine optimization interested them and receiving a blank stare in return.
You need a counselor with both the abilities to guide and the knowledge of the new world of work to guide effectively in the present.
That is where we will help. We endeavor to literally change the lives of our clients.
Past patterns matter when giving advice. Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, a brilliant book on this issue. In a nutshell, experts are defined as such because they have thousands of past patterns in their brain bank. This enables experts to quickly examine a situation based on almost instantaneous leveraging of those patterns. Doctors perhaps best represent such expertise in their ability to diagnose a patient based on a few symptoms.
Expert career counselors have the same capacity. In our case, we have worked with thousands of college graduates in Connecticut who have been searching for career guidance. We are able to leverage our knowledge and provide strategic guidance based on our past success.
Why would you get a career counselor for your child?
The main reason: you are probably not a very good career counselor – at least for your child!
Symbolically, parents are the unconditional provider of love and nurturing. Career guidance is often misinterpreted as orders or judgment from the parent.
In comparison, we have well developed expertise in helping young adults chart their career path and we do not suffer from having parental baggage that clouds the career discussion.
This expertise emanates from a decade of college and career counseling thousands of young adults.
Our process is proprietary in nature but involves a combination of interviewing and personality profiling to help our clients figure out their path. After we understand our clients, we provide a strategic advisory plan to help our clients reach their path.
In terms of our interviewing process, there are aspects of personality profiling testing that cannot quite capture the values, background, and idiosyncratic outlooks of our career counseling clients. For that reason, services that only have computer generated profiling systems almost always provide advice that is too generic to be helpful.
To be clear, we find many of these tests both fun and somewhat helpful. Indeed, from our own business model, it would make far more sense to take the labor out of our work and rely purely on computer generated testing. From an effectiveness standpoint, however, we find the interview process critical to provide tailored, customized advice.
With that said, while we value our interviewing process and believe it differentiates us in effectiveness from the career sites that only provide testing, we definitely believe that career personality profiling tests are helpful in providing information and data points.
Sometimes the information can be extraordinarily insightful and our clients will have breakthrough moments of self-awareness. Strangely, unless questioned in ways that validated tests do, many people do not fully understand their own internal preferences.
The combination of advisory services, through interviewing and discussion, plus career personality profiling tests provides the most effective way to help our clients.
Upon helping our Connecticut clients with their career counseling needs, we provide concrete, direct advice on what fields best match; what should be done to move into the field; and, as needed, help with resume, interviewing, and job searching.
