# Are career counselors helpful?



## Amine (Feb 23, 2014)

I have been in sales for a year now. I make good money at it, but it was never something I really saw myself doing for the rest of my career. It is pretty hectic. You find out your schedule at 9PM the night before, then you drive around in a 4 hour radius from appointment to appointment trying to close deals. Some days I can be gone from home for over 12 hours, but that is often filled to some extent with driving and downtime between appointments where it wouldn't make sense to go home. I also have to work Saturdays, which sucks. One nice thing, though, is that it slows down in the winter so you're only getting a few appointments a week.

Anyway, I don't really know what my best options are as far as where to look for a different career, so I was thinking about hiring a career counselor. Anyone have experience with these? Do they work very well? Anything in particular I should ask them or look for?


----------



## Poundcake (May 21, 2017)

I thought about becoming a career counselor before settling on a recruiter. It's similar, you're looking for someone's strengths and how they can be best applied, but the counselor is more like an attorney in that they're exclusively to help you. I would say to go for it. If you really don't like their advice, you don't have to take it and sometimes fresh eyes can see something you might have missed, and they're trained to know what to look for. Either way, best of luck in finding a suitable career path.


----------



## angelfish (Feb 17, 2011)

I spent $200ish on a local career counselor and still regret it. Definite waste of both money and time. I've gotten better suggestions and analysis from strangers on the internet. I wouldn't bother going to one unless you get a personal recommendation from someone who's gone to the counselor before. 



Amine said:


> You find out your schedule at 9PM the night before, then you drive around in a 4 hour radius from appointment to appointment trying to close deals. Some days I can be gone from home for over 12 hours, but that is often filled to some extent with driving and downtime between appointments where it wouldn't make sense to go home. I also have to work Saturdays, which sucks.


That sounds incredibly challenging.


----------



## RocketSurgeon (Mar 22, 2017)

I imagine _most_ career counselors are people who really wanted a great career but ultimately couldn't do much more than...be a career counselor and try to tell others how to get a great career.

I could be wrong, though. Maybe you just need to do some research on which counselor would be best for you.

Perhaps you could get help with this from a...Career counselor counselor?


----------



## birdsintrees (Aug 20, 2012)

Really comes down to the person. Some career counsellors I know from my time in HR are great at reading their clients and can offer genuine insights that help them find a different path or find a way to tweak their current path. Then there those that lack that insight and they would be a real waste of money. 

I'd check in your network to see if anyone can recommend you to one so that you have a bit of background knowledge on what to expect.


----------



## Hypaspist (Feb 11, 2012)

Depends on where you go. I've one that was amazing, and another that just spent the entire time lecturing me on MBTI. The general point is they can talk all you want, but you gotta know what you want to do and make your own decisions. Prepare for packets. Lots and lots of packets.


----------



## Tridentus (Dec 14, 2009)

I've had careers counselling as a student, which I found incredibly disapppointing- mainly because I was better at researching my options than this "professional" was... 1-2 years later I've accepted to do an MA in Career Management to enter the field..

My understanding is that it hugely depends on the individual, much like any type of counselling would do.. There are great counsellors, and those who are crap but can skate by just following the most basic guidelines. I intend to be someone who uses my own talents, where I think I'm more talented in this area than most, along with the training and education I'm given, to make myself valuable to clients.

One thing I feel sure of is that you can't be a great careers advisor without widespread experience- and I have that where others don't. I've worked a variety of fields, and understand the real world problems that go with a large variety of industries and experiences.. As well as having been raised in 3 different countries and having travelled extensively meeting a huge variety of people from all fields....

So you could get someone like I hope to be.. Or you could get someone who just did a part-time catering job for a bit, stayed in the same town with the same people, and then qualified in the same humdrum process.

It just depends.


----------



## Thomas60 (Aug 7, 2011)

At the cheap end, there are some government funded career counselors who's job is to promote employment in their local area. I find there's some baseline standard, although there simplistic in approach (deal with low skill labor and trades moreso), they may have additional resources that will cut down on some of your time or create networking opportunities.
Private sector is riskier, as you might end up paying for crap, reputation matters. Ultimately, noone is going to 'get you a job' and as a decent sales person, I expect you're more proactive than most, so it's whether you feel your search is more productive, result yielding, and/or purposeful... that's the underlying metric.


----------



## BlackDog (Jan 6, 2012)

I don't really find any kind of counselling helpful, including career counselling. I am sure they help some people but in my experience they are never able to tell me anything I didn't already know. Which I mean, fair enough. They can't look into a magic ball and tell you what you should do with your life, they can only probe you until you answer the question for yourself. But I don't really need their probing. And with the internet I can frankly do my own research about job prospects and what kind of education I need. So, eh, if it's free help then sure. But I wouldn't pay for one.

I talk to professors sometimes for guidance, but it's just not really been that helpful either. One woman told me to just get a second masters degree instead of going for a Phd, which was interesting. But she thought I might want to work for the federal government and I don't really. 

I'd say go for it if you're really stuck and you want someone to guide you, but don't waste a bunch of money. You're probably better of just self-reflecting on what you want to do with your life.


----------



## Amine (Feb 23, 2014)

I wound up using a career counselor and she was very helpful. I think more people should take advantage of them. I feel like I'm on the optimal track in my life right now.


----------



## Tropes (Jul 7, 2016)

What would they know? They chose to be career counselors. If you need someone to list random jobs for you until something clicks, here's a random job generator. Good luck.


----------



## Amine (Feb 23, 2014)

Genghis Kohen said:


> What would they know? They chose to be career counselors. If you need someone to list random jobs for you until something clicks, here's a random job generator. Good luck.


Do you have a point? Eh, kind of, not really. 

Starting from the beginning, I had a sense of feeling lost. I had quit my job and was completely free. Sure, I could try to dive in on my own, but I didn't really know where to begin. It's like there were too many possibilities and I had no idea what I even wanted. Should I try to find a job right now? Should I try to go back to school so I can get a better job later? Should I try to find something science related, something education related, something sales related, something else entirely? Should I settle for working for a low salary at first and hope to build it up, or should I try for something higher right away?

These questions and more were all making the task look impossible to get a foothold in. I don't even really know the resources available to me that well. What is there, Google? So I can find some shitty articles about finding the right job? Indeed? Craigslist? Surely there is more out there that I can use to make the best choice in a very important decision.

I figured a career counselor would know a lot more than I about all of this. Not only that, but working with someone, I would be forced to pull my weight and keep taking forward steps. That's good for a procrastinator like me. 

These intuitions turned out to be pretty much true. We of course started with the personality assessments, which I'm no longer a big believer in but they sort of actually did help me start thinking about who I am, what I enjoy, and what I want. Then we started addressing the question of whether to find a job right away or go to school. My counselor had a very large network and she was able to think up ideas for present opportunities while also sending me out to people she knew in various fields to interview them, shadow them, and get a feel for if that was what I was into. She also led me to online resources I don't think I would have found on my own that gave good information about various professions like what its duties are, what sort of personality variables it uses most, what the future outlook is, earnings, etc.

Also in general she gave me the sort of advice a person with a lot more experience in this realm can give. For instance, at one point an opportunity came my way to do some volunteering for a university science professor and my parents were like "go for it", but when I told her about it she said it was pointless and the professor just wanted a gopher/bitch to do their menial work for them. 

It is always easy to say you can do things on your own and sometimes that could be technically true in some alternate universe where you aren't really you and you happen to have a lot more drive, motivation, and resourcefulness than you really do. 

On the other hand, I feel solid about having gotten help. It made the whole process nice and smooth and I feel I probably got a better outcome than I would have had I done it on my own, which matters a whole lot considering this is what will shape my life over the next few decades. Could be the difference between living a well-off life at a job I enjoy vs. working a shitty dead end job that I took because I didn't know all my options. That's pretty significant.


----------



## Eu_citzen (Jan 18, 2018)

I never really had any good experience with career counselors, I meet 2 during studies years ago as part of the schooling process.
Often they were very idealistic, i.e. not pragmatic enough for my "wants/needs".


----------



## Amine (Feb 23, 2014)

Eu_citzen said:


> I never really had any good experience with career counselors, I meet 2 during studies years ago as part of the schooling process.
> Often they were very idealistic, i.e. not pragmatic enough for my "wants/needs".


Being older and having had some experience helped me know how to use my career counselor. I could have done the same thing in high school and not gotten much out of it because my head was just in the clouds at that point. 

Perhaps it also makes a difference that this wasn't part of some process. I found a private career counselor (and did a lot of deliberation about which one to go with first) and picked the one I thought would be most practical for me. 

She was the opposite of idealistic. Said she gets a lot of girls in their 20s who want to be Yoga instructors and she has to tell them that is a bad idea. That sort of thing. I told her money was pretty important to me, etc.


----------



## Brown Bird (Jul 5, 2017)

Hi, the only direct experience I have with career counselors has been with the school I am currently attending. Two of them, just went by a test, a version of the riasec and were like, you should do what the tests says or head in that general direction. The third was actually helpful and gave me some helpful tips about what to do. In this situation I had decided on a general career direction, I just wanted a plan B in case it didn't work out. I think it does help if you have some idea of what you want to do. I am sure there are people who are really great and some that aren't. It seems in these people jobs, there are people who don't enjoy the work and/or aren't very good at it but insist on staying in it. I suppose there are some popular books out there about career change too. But honestly, you probably have some general idea about what you really want to do, you just need to flesh it out or maybe you are having trouble accepting some part of that wants to express itself through the medium of an occupation. That is/was my problem. One piece of advice, don't keep thinking about it, you will just sabotage yourself and not listen to your gut which does play a role at some point in this process and then you will make hardly any progress. Good luck.


----------



## Eu_citzen (Jan 18, 2018)

Amine said:


> Being older and having had some experience helped me know how to use my career counselor. I could have done the same thing in high school and not gotten much out of it because *my head was just in the clouds at that point*.


That's exactly right, even if I were not terribly up in the clouds.
Counselors job should've been to bring down my expectations to a realistic level even more. (IMHO)

It all comes down to the individual doing the counseling.


----------

