Tag Archives: Career Counsellors Chapter

How to Handle Top College/University Career Centre Questions: Best Practices Discussions

Posted by: Guest on November 14, 2012 3:36 pm

When I finished my Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology in 2006, I felt like I knew more about how to provide counselling, and at the same time I had realized I knew much less about what counselling might be about. I found a role as a career advisor, which included both employment advising and career counselling to a population of mature college students who were predominantly older than me. The wonderful manager who hired me displayed exceptional confidence in me, given that I had not worked in a career centre except for a few weeks as part of a practicum experience. To my knowledge I did not let her or the students down, but I found myself in a daily struggle to find what I needed to know about providing ethical, responsible service to the students.

I couldn’t find a lot of what when it came to best practices for providing career counselling with a particular client group, recent immigrant professionals, and after a couple of years I realized that I was going to have go and find out what I could do to better support this group, so I did something I had thought I would never do: I applied to doctoral programs in counselling psychology, because I needed (my own selfish need, probably) to find out what to do and also how to help this client group more effectively.

As a doctoral student in counselling psychology, I am daily tasked not only with the responsibility for self-reflection and assessment of my practice, but I will also be evaluated on the understanding I develop through the process of self-reflection and self-assessment, as well as on the practice. You may have had this experience yourself, as counselling or psychotherapy is “…an undefined technique applied to unspecified problems with unpredictable outcome. For this we recommend rigorous training” (Raimy, 1950, p. 150). I often suspect that our clients are more forgiving of us as counsellors-in-training than we are of ourselves. But I digress.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Working on Meaning and Purpose: Mid-career Shifts and Decisions

Posted by: Sally Halliday on October 19, 2012 4:00 pm

Working on Meaning and Purpose: Mid-career Shifts and Decisions

Is it me? Is it the job? Do I stay for the security or should I do something completely different? Do I even have a career?

Questions like these are the ones I most often hear from clients who are in mid-career, and I can often sense, if not see, the tears welling up, the anger held in the jaw, and the head slumped with embarrassment. Career counselling for those who are unhappy at the work they have invested in for over a decade have a lot on their minds. How can we support a client who feels the panic of time running out, and who says that they feel like they have never even made a real career decision before? And what if I leave, or I stay, and I never get to realize my dreams?

My teaching and private practice work with mid-career shifters was a natural draw for me, having made my own career change from journalism to counselling. My academic research and current practice focuses on mid-life changes and transitions, providing a lens that helps me support the deeper questions about life and career, values and meaning, and how to realize our full potential before we die.

So the first re-frame I might offer to a client who often say they haven’t really made a career decision before is that you did, indeed, make decisions before, ones that were career-oriented, and based on the influences and information that were relevant then. And then to validate that as we get to know ourselves more through our work and lives, we have the opportunity to truly make a conscious decision.  William Bridges (2004) puts it in another way, saying that earlier on in our careers, the focus is on competency, on proving ourselves. It may be to please a parent, or to just get out of the house, but proving our worth in the world is important. Later on, according to Bridges, job shifts and career changes are more about meaning and purpose.  The way I hear this from a client is that the job itself used to be important, or the specific company (status) or the profession itself.  Now, this same person is more interested in how they are working, not so much what the job is. They are curious about who their colleagues are, what the company stands for, or how he or she will get along with the boss. The definition of job satisfaction has changed. And there may be a yearning, as Carl Jung discovered, and David Whyte (2009) articulates so well, that as we age, we want to be more authentic, and be congruent in ourselves. As a counsellor, I can engage them to become more aware of whether they want to bring more of themselves into the workplace, which may mean asking for what they want. If congruence is about aligning our inner selves more with the outer world, then certainly our work is one way we can express that.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA