Career Counselling ???? What ??

Every institute you walk in today there are counsellors, in the garb of counselling they sell the program to you, have you ever heard NIIT or the aptechs or the seed infotech’s of the world telling the student that he doesn't have the aptitude for IT so he shouldn’t take up this course. NO. Rather they would develop the aptitude(something that's vague).

While i was working with the Piramal’s I also had a mid-career crisis syndrome catching up on me, so decided to visit a very well known career counsellor in South Mumbai. The guy was young and smart, he suggested me to take up an MBA abroad ( he was running a special batch for working students for GMAT), indirectly he was selling it to me, after TWO sittings i paid him Rs.7000/- to understand that I need Rs.60 Lakhs to get an MBA from a foreign univ.

Now this was the great career counsellor at Mumbai, I happened to see some of the so called career counselling/ career guidance processes in Pune for youngsters, again the same, in the name of career its education these people were pointing to.

People have mis-understood career with job or career with education or career with occupation or career with just doing a course. I need to explain.

Career is a term defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an individual's "course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)". It is usually considered to pertain to remunerative work (and sometimes also formal education).The etymology of the term is somewhat ironic in that it comes from the Latin word carrera, which means race (as in "rat race," a pejorative implying the opposite of a useful career).A career is mostly seen as a course of successive situations that make up a person's occupation.

This was then but later the definition has changed and here is the new definition that's published on wiktionary :

One's calling in life; a person's occupation.

An individual’s work and life roles over their lifespan.

A jouster's path during a joust

Do people understand this or the greats in career counselling understand this. The career counsellor focus on pointing the education the person needs to take up than creating the path that makes him or builds him into a successful individual.

So then what is a career?.. The definition goes like this: A career is the total of our work activities—at home, at work, our education and in our extra curricular activities. A career also includes the time we spend learning new things. Even if you don’t think you have a career, you do! And you don’t have to be in certain occupations to have a career. Anyone who has spent time working at anything has a career. For example Sachin Tendulkar, he has build his entire career around cricket, looking back every activity was focussed on a career of cricket.

And what is an occupation? : An occupation is a group of similar jobs for which people usually have to develop skills and knowledge. An occupation is a specific category of work. A person can have several different jobs within an occupation. They can adapt their knowledge and skills to a variety of positions. Examples of occupations include the following: electrician, engineer and teacher.

What is a job?: A job is the position a person holds doing specific duties. For example, an occupation is Customer Services . The job is rresolving customer issues at the Vodafone Telecom Gallery . People usually change jobs more often than they change occupations.

What is Education?:Education can be defined as the art or process of imparting skill and knowledge. Education can be either formal or informal. The success of education lies in harnessing the latent potential of an individual. Informal education happens subconsciously when the values and behaviour of an individual is shaped due to constant interaction with his environment. Formal education on the other hand, is a deliberate effort by a person to learn the skills and techniques considered important for a particular job or activity.

And now what's career counselling : Career Counselling and career coaching are similar in nature to traditional counselling (Kim, Li, Lian, 2002). However, the focus is generally on issues such as career exploration, career change, personal career development and other career related issues (Swanson, 1995). Typically when people come for career counseling they know exactly what they want to get out of the process, but are unsure about how it will work (Galassi, Crace, Martin, James, and Wallace, 1992).

Career counseling advisors assess people's interests, personality, values and skills, and also help them explore career options and research graduate and professional schools. Career counseling provides one-on-one or group professional assistance in exploration and decision making tasks related to choosing a major/occupation, transitioning into the world of work or further professional training. The field is vast and includes career placement, career planning, learning strategies and student development.

So next time you walk into a career counsellors office.. check for your self if knows the basics??