How career guidance helps you choose a profession

Contents:

• What is career guidance
• How it helps people choose a profession
• Top Career Guidance Tools from an Expert
• Help Yourself. Advice from an Expert
• Why Career Guidance Is Useful
• Don’t be afraid to choose and change your profession

What is career guidance

Career guidance helps people choose a profession that matches their interests, abilities, and market needs. Career guidance may include testing, questionnaires, consultations with psychologists and specialists in choosing a profession.

— Career guidance is the search for the best solution between the three components of a successful career and internal comfort,— shares Ekaterina Borovets.— This is a person’s idea of ​​​​an ideal job, his real capabilities and prospects for their improvement, current trends in the labor market.

Usually, career guidance is conducted in schools, employment centers and on educational platforms. Working with individual experts can be no less effective.

How career guidance helps people in choosing a profession

Career guidance work is built on three pillars:

• defining a person’s desires, interests, and values;
• analyzing the labor market and finding matches between a person’s abilities and market demand;
• analysis of the respondent's resources: time, energy, financial and psychological readiness to acquire new skills and a profession.

Career guidance specialists help people identify their real interests and abilities, including hidden ones. They analyze the current situation in the labor market, prepare people for professional self-determination, and help with choosing a specialty. They develop recommendations for choosing a profession, create educational and career tracks, and provide psychological support.

— Just a few decades ago, career guidance was defined in dictionaries as helping young people choose their future profession. Today, adults need such help just as much as those just starting their careers,— the expert says. —At the same time, changing professions in adulthood is usually a more difficult stage than choosing a professional path for the first time. A good career guidance specialist always understands this and takes into account the specifics of working with established adults who are faced with the need to change not only their specialty and place of work, but also their lifestyle and life itself.

Top career guidance tools from an expert

Today, there are many tools that help in career guidance. Ekaterina Borovets helped the editorial board of Skillbox.by compile a list of the main ones. Let's dwell on each of the methods in a little more detail.

• Testing and questionnaires.They help to identify a person's area of ​​interest and their abilities. Can be conducted online and offline. Such tools are designed in such a way as to be able to clearly separate physicists from lyricists and understand which area a person is more inclined to. Towards the exact sciences, analysis, creativity, management or something else.
  Such tests often include an interests questionnaire, a list of questions about what a person likes to do, what he is fascinated by, and what subjects he enjoys. By answering these questions, you can determine your interests and understand what professions may be of interest.
• Consultations with professionals. Help a person understand what professions match his interests and skills.
• Educational programs They help you experience the process of choosing the right profession that matches your interests and abilities. Such programs include courses, seminars, trainings, etc. For example, Skillbox's specialized course "Who to Become" is in great demand today. Thanks to it, a person will be able to understand which industries they will work in, what tasks they will perform, and who will work with them on a team. They will be able to try out different, in-demand professions on the labor market and see for themselves.
• Interactive games and simulations. Allow you to immerse yourself in different professions to understand which one is more suitable.
• Communication with people.If a person is interested in a particular profession, you can communicate with people who are already working in it. This helps to understand the specifics of the work, assess the requirements for specialists at different career levels and prospects for career growth.

Help yourself. Advice from an expert

Career self-determination helps a person identify their own interests, skills, and abilities. The expert offers several tips so that you can independently help yourself with your career choice.

• Explore your interests and values.Answer basic questions and be honest with yourself: what you like to do, what activities bring you pleasure, what qualities you value in people, and people in you.
• Explore and evaluate your skills. Answer the questions: what can you do well, what tasks do you perform best, what tasks would you like to avoid.
• Research different professions.Attend exhibitions, conferences, and other events related to the professions that interest you. Watch specialized videos, listen to podcasts, read publications on online platforms. This will help you get an idea of ​​​​how people work in these fields.
• Enroll in free courses. Today, educational platforms offer many introductory courses that allow you to learn about professions.
• Don't be afraid to make mistakes.The process of professional self-determination can be complex and takes time. Don't be afraid to change your mind and try new things.

In addition to independent work, career guidance and career development specialists can help with self-determination. And they use certain methods in their work. Ekaterina Borovets outlined the main tools that help career guidance experts:

• "I Want/I Can/I Need."This technique helps to determine what a person really wants to do in life, what opportunities he has and what needs to be done to achieve his goals. A person must answer three questions: "What do I want to do?", "What can I do?" and "What do I need to do?" And based on these answers, he determines his professional orientation.
• Skills Wheel.Consists of circles, each of which corresponds to a certain category of skills: communication, problem solving, time management, etc. A person notes how well he has mastered each of the skills, and based on this, he determines his strengths and weaknesses.
• Career Map. A tool that helps people plan their careers. The map contains information about different professions, their requirements, career prospects, etc. A person can use this map to determine which profession is right for them and what steps to take to achieve their career goals.
• Career Self-Determination Test. A test that helps determine which professional field a person is inclined to. It contains questions about what professions a person prefers, what skills he needs to work successfully in these professions, etc. And based on the test results, a person can choose a profession that suits him.

Why is career guidance useful?

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this process. Career guidance helps to get a sought-after specialist who is eager to work and build a career for which he has both an inclination and aspiration. And vice versa. If a person goes into a profession without due desire and an understanding of the correctness of the choice, the labor market gets a not very valuable beginner specialist, but a degree for the sake of a degree.

— This is especially important for applicants to universities, colleges and other educational institutions. Many applicants choose a profession not with their own hearts and minds, but under the pressure of advice from their parents, friends, or advertising, obsessively advising them on how to live and what to study, — Ekaterina believes. —And either, obeying the least resistance and self-doubt, applicants go with the flow towards a specialty with the least competition, or choose an education that is closer to home.

At the same time, the expert argues that career guidance is important not only for teenagers. Adults also face certain problems when choosing a new business:

• Fear of change.Many people after some time realize that their choice of profession was not a good one. They received an education, a job, and even a more or less satisfactory salary. But the work does not bring joy and pleasure, and there are no career ambitions. And the fear of changing their lives and breaking away from their comfortable place simply paralyzes their will and dreams.
• Lack of self-confidence and stereotypical thinking.For example, a person had a low grade in mathematics in school, and he believes that he will not succeed in the IT field. But if you look more broadly, modern programming does not require the active use of higher mathematics, and the industry offers many professions that are not related to writing code.
• Misconceptions about one's own abilities. For example, a person secretly believes they are a born artist. But confidence alone isn't always enough. Career guidance helps identify true inclinations and, if necessary, adjust a career plan. For example, if a person is not very good at drawing with their hands, they can master computer design at a decent level.

Career guidance experts are unanimous in their opinion that changing professions is not something out of the ordinary today. Moreover, employers today are more loyal to the presence of higher education.

— Companies need real skills and a drive to achieve the best results. For example, Facebook and Google long ago removed a higher education degree from their requirements. This is both logical and commercially understandable. Academic education is drawn out. It requires a large number of disciplines that are not directly related to the specialty,— Ekaterina shares. — And specialized courses on reputable educational platforms provide the maximum benefit from the necessary theory and intensive practice. As a result, in a year and a half, you can gain more relevant and in-demand knowledge than a student would in five years of university. And also to create a decent portfolio and get help with employment, which is not offered by all vocational schools and universities today.

Don't be afraid to choose and change professions

The modern labor market is developing rapidly. Choosing the first profession is becoming more difficult, and changing professional activities in adulthood is gradually becoming the norm. Career guidance work helps to create a list of professions that are suitable for a person and draw up a basic career plan. Thanks to this, a person understands what stages he will have to go through on the way to his dream job, which will give him financial freedom, independence and moral satisfaction.

In career guidance, Ekaterina Borovets recommends working with specialists. No matter how responsible and open a person is with themselves, experience shows that working with a career guidance expert yields better and more accurate results, leading to their goals faster.

— Career guidance is a good way to choose your first profession. And it's an effective way to change your life if your first choice turned out to be wrong or your profession has become irrelevant due to the advancement of civilization. It's never too late to change the future. Therefore, the main thing is not to delay and not to be afraid, — the expert summarizes.