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Saturday April 27, 2024

Importance of career counseling in life

By Prof. Dr. Hafiz Mushtaq Ahmad
January 24, 2021

Unfortunately, there is no sound system in place for counseling and guidance for selecting careers. As a result, students go for those subjects/courses that don’t match their mental aptitude. Not surprisingly, they become frustrated and feel like being wasted.

The modern concept of career counseling is the product of the industrial age. During the industrial age, most individuals were employed by large organizations whose primary purpose was producing a tangible product. During the industrial age, work was concentrated in employment, learning was concentrated in education, and education preceded employment. The role of career counseling was to facilitate the passage from one system (education) to the next (employment). This is why most career counseling takes place in educational institutions.

Career counseling is a process that will help you to know and understand yourself and the world of work in order to make career, educational, and life decisions. Career development is more than just deciding on a major and what job you want to get when you graduate.

Career counseling is a life time process. Mainly it can be divided into the stages like, a pre-school stage, secondary school stage, post-secondary stage, professional study stage, and professional stge. Career counseling, also known as career guidance, is designed to help with choosing, changing, or leaving a career and is available at any stage in life. It is agreed that career is often one of the most important aspects of adulthood, and embarking on a new career, whether for the first time, the second time, or any time thereafter, can be a stressful event, especially when economic difficulties such as recession are a factor.

Choosing a career is an important task, but it may also be a problematic and challenging task. It may not be easy to decide what type of job will be the best fit, and since career counseling helps people assess their skills, needs, and desires in order to find a career that works for them, this type of counseling is considered to be an important step to take before deciding on a permanent career.

There are a number of factors that influence your career development, including your interests, abilities, values, personality, background, and circumstances. It is a devastating need for career counseling and guidance of students and parents a comprehensive program has been designed to help students clear at the obstacles in choosing their careers. This program is according to individual needs and will lead to personality development students and polish up their skills required to prosper in life. Career counseling and guidance services will not only help students perform better, but will also go a long way toward achieving the goals of life.

Importance and benefits of career counseling: It is observed that exploring a wide variety of potential careers may be overwhelming, and information on the skill sets and education needed for a particular position may be contradictory or difficult to find. Career counseling comes forward and provide invaluable information in these areas and others to enable clients to follow right direction.

Career counseling is beneficial for both short-term and long-term success in your professional life. Spending time with a career counselor enables you to recognize your value as a professional, find a new job, get a promotion or just get advice concerning work-related issues from an expert. It allows you to reflect on the knowledge, skills, and abilities that you possess to allow you to map a career path that is aligned with your values.

In Pakistan students tend to face a number of difficulties while choosing a career path. That is largely because of the lack of availability of career counselors in different institutes and colleges. Students in Pakistan tend to make decisions based on what their peers and elders recommend which makes them confuse and puts them in a dilemma where they cannot think for themselves anymore. This leads towards students picking the wrong career path and instead of feeling inspired and motivated towards their jobs or majors, rather they face difficulties and complications in comprehending the field that they have picked for themselves, which not only demotivates them but, also extinguishes the fire of progression in them.

Career counseling is a long-term process and starts with the career counselor engaging with you in conversation to find out more about your career interests, personality, background and work-related issues that are important for you.

There are moments in life when we are all faced with making big decisions. One of the biggest decisions is choosing the right career. Career counseling help to uncover all the things we need to think about, along with useful tips that will hopefully lead us to making the right choice. Career counseling help you in figuring out the best-suited career path. Everyone, be it a student or alumni, should get themselves counseled. It is rather important to get counseling at the earliest stage to deliberately take the best decisions for the career.