COUNSELING AND GUIDANCE

 3.2 COUNSELING AND GUIDANCE

Counselling is a process that focuses on enhancing the psychological well being of the client, such that the client is then able to reach their full potential. This is achieved by the counsellor facilitating your personal growth, development, and self understanding, which in turn empowers you to adopt more constructive life practices. The purpose of guidance is to provide ‘learning experiences to enable clients to acquire knowledge, skills and competencies related to making personal, educational and career decisions’ Guidance includes, but is not limited to, educational guidance and counselling services staffed by trained professionals. Career planning is a lifelong process, which includes choosing an occupation, getting a job, growing in our job, possibly changing careers, and eventually retiring. We will focus on career choice and the process one goes through in selecting an occupation. This may happen once in our lifetimes, but it is more likely to happen several times as we first define and then redefine ourselves and our goals. Career development and the career planning process include a number of specific steps that help to identify personal skills and attributes. Finding out how those skills can be utilised in the job market is accomplished by researching a number of career fields that are of interest to you and then by gaining experience in those fields and/or speaking to people currently working in the field. Career counselors provide mainly career counseling outside the school setting. Their chief focus is helping individuals with career decisions. Vocational counselors explore and evaluate the client’s education, training, work history, interests, skills, and personality traits. They may arrange for aptitude and achievement tests to help the client make career decisions. They also work with individuals to develop their job search skills and assist clients in locating and applying for jobs. In addition, career counselors provide support to people experiencing job loss, job stress, or other career transition issues. Career guidance refers to services and activities intended to assist individuals of any age and at any point throughout their lives, to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage their careers. Such services may be found in schools, universities and colleges, in training institutions, in public employment services, in the workplace, in the voluntary or community sector and in the private sector. The activities may take place on an individual or group basis and may be face to face or at a distance. A decision is a choice between two or more alternatives. If you only have one alternative, you do not have a decision. Decision making can be regarded as the mental processes (cognitive process) resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.

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