After seeing the other
blog posts, I noticed most people seemed to choose Chapter 6 to discuss. To go a different route, I will be discussing
Chapter 14 regarding career counseling in private practice. Speaking honestly, I was not aware that
counselors existed that are primarily trained and licensed solely to perform
career counseling. It was only after
taking this course and reading Chapter 14 in the text book that I became aware
of that specific profession. Also
through this course and the text, I have learned a lot more about career
counseling and what it entails. The first
thing in this chapter that I want to discuss is the types of services that
career counselors provide.
When we hear the term career counselor we
automatically think of careers and vocational choices. One would assume that a career counselor
should help direct career decision making and guide the client in changing
careers and making the best vocational decision for themselves and their
families. Although this is, indeed, one
function of the career counselor, they also provide numerous other services to their
clientele. Career counselors can help
with resume construction, vocational skill development, planning for
retirement, testing, and they can even conduct group counseling and
consultations. In addition to these
services, career counselors may also address mental health needs if there is a
co-existing disorder, and especially if insurance companies do not want to fund
the career counseling services. The text
states that approximately 11 million people sought professional help with their
careers during a survey that was conducted (Brown, 2012). That is a fair amount of people that sought
career counseling in this study. I
consider it to be an interesting statistic since I have never experienced
career counseling myself, and, quite frankly, was not too sure of what all it
entailed prior to this class.
I believe that more people would use career counseling if
they knew how to access it and the benefits of its use. I think career counseling would be helpful to
anyone with the wide variety of services it provides. High schools should require students to have
a minimum of three sessions with a career counselor prior to graduation. This may help high school students be better equipped
for college and “the real world”. It also
may help provide high school students with a better sense of direction in life
and help guide their aspirations.
As
stated in previous blogs, I know that I could have personally benefited from
such sessions with a career counselor. I
think the economic struggles we face could partially be due to lack of interest
and decreased job satisfaction. Perhaps career
counseling could help solve some of those problems for families to help place
them in a job where they are happy and would like to strive for tenure. If this would happen, the economy may see an
increase in production of its employees and workers. This possibility is realistic,
and it couldn’t hurt to utilize these resources in an attempt to better our
economic state.
References
Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career
counseling, and career development (10th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.
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