Career Counseling

We make our first career planning at a young age. Someone wants to be an astronaut, someone wants to be a doctor, someone wants to sing, someone wants to dance and go to adulthood with this goal. But in most cases our childhood plans change, new interests and new goals appear.

One of the most difficult decisions we have to make is before graduation. It’s hard for a 16- or 17-year-old high school student to make a balanced decision, it’s hard to see all the prospects for the future from this age. Quite often this choice is pressured by family and society, of course with the best of intentions. Choosing a profession, yesterday’s schoolboy does not yet fully understand whether he made the right choice, whether he will be able to realize his potential in this profession and most importantly whether he will be happy.

Career counseling can help with this difficult choice. Career counseling is testing and counseling to help you make an informed choice about your profession and your career path. Career counseling helps you to organize your thoughts and desires for your future career and match them with your talents, interests and abilities.

Psychologists and career counseling specialists recommend starting to prepare for the choice of a profession from the age of 10–12. To do this, you need to develop your child’s talents and strengths, and send him or her to specialized classes.

Ideally, when the child is 14 years old, individual career counseling is needed. Schools can start introducing different professions, holding meetings with psychologists and career counseling specialists, as well as organizing excursions to businesses. This is important for making the most informed decision after graduation.

Students are also faced with career counseling issues. One part of students who have already started university and have realized that it’s not really what they want to do for the rest of their lives. This will be most helpful for students, because it is better to realize and adjust your choices in the initial stages than to waste 4–5 years.

But there are also other cases where career counseling helps to choose a narrower specialization in the profession, not to learn everything a little at a time, but to choose the direction that is most interesting or in-demand in the market. For this purpose, more and more IT companies hold meetings with students in the 2–3 year to tell what technologies and platforms are now in demand, where the IT industry is moving in general. Some universities have special programs of cooperation in adapting specialists for a particular enterprise. The enterprise organizes a series of meetings and seminars to adapt students to market requirements.

For example, when studying programming, you can learn several languages bit by bit, or you can choose 1 major programming language, 1 scripting language, and 1–2 markup languages. By practicing in a particular specialization, the student will get more hands-on experience needed for the job.

There are also many situations in adulthood where career counseling is needed. The first years after university, when a former student starts working, there are the first meetings in the working reality and now a young professional realizes that the given job does not meet his expectations. There are a huge number of examples when young professionals completely change their specialty or the industry as a whole.

There are also other cases when a specialist is satisfied with his or her job, but because of the economic crisis the company closes or he or she is made redundant. Faced with the changed circumstances in life, it can be difficult to understand what to do now, where to look for a job, and most importantly what kind of job. For this, it is advisable to seek career guidance counseling and career counselor in general. A career counselor can help you build your profile, point out your strengths and weaknesses, show you ways to develop and what knowledge, skills and abilities you need to learn or update to find a job. There are career counselors at employment centers, where you can also get a new specialty. It is very important during this period not to get depressed, but to ask for help from a professional.

Many companies, understanding the importance of employee’s satisfaction, their desire to see the prospects of development and their career growth, begin to introduce elements of career orientation and career planning. This is still mainly done by HR managers, but more and more psychologists and career consultants are appearing. Large companies carry out periodic staff assessments, create individual career development plans (career roadmap), organize advanced training of employees, introduce mentoring programs, create internal universities and academies.

Career counseling is a very promising direction, especially for IT companies, which can help schoolchildren and high school students to navigate in the fast-changing world of professions. Career counseling provides an opportunity to communicate directly with schoolchildren and students, to prepare them for the realities of work. This will significantly increase the level of awareness and training of young professionals. It will save the company money for retraining specialists for themselves. It will adapt education to the needs of the market. Also this direction is very effective, when an adult specialist wants to change the sphere of work, to master a new speciality, to go to work remotely.

We recommend doing a few simple things that will help you figure out your own vocational guidance.

1. Do some introspection. Ask yourself what inspires you, what interests you, what you can do, what you do well and can do it all day long. Write it down.

2. Make a list of current and contemporary occupations (no more than 10–15). Look for more information about current professions on the Internet.

3. Research promising professions. Read futuristic articles about professions that will be in demand in the near future.

4. Study each field of interest. Read blogs of leading experts, watch webinars, use different sources to learn as much as possible about the direction of interest.

5. Develop your universal skills, soft skills and learn English.

6. Take a free vocational test or sign up for a consultation with a psychologist or career counselor.

Career counseling is a great opportunity to honestly admit to yourself what you really want to do, what you want to do, but adapted to today’s career market.