Why we need to stop the careers counselling guessing game

School careers advisors are like a “backwards Google” and the tools they use are “Orwellian” and “detached from reality”, or at least so said journalist and concerned parent James Panichi in this masthead last month.

He is both harsh and fair, right and wrong. The same goes for the hundred plus comments which generally echoed his complaints. There was particular opprobrium reserved for the use of online matching assessments.

Choosing one career early in life doesn’t mean we’ll end up doing it forever, so it’s important to know how to change tack.Credit: Louise Kennerley

I have been researching career development and training careers advisors for almost 30 years and some things never change. The most common complaint without fail over all that time was and continues to take the form of “I / my child/ partner was told by a careers advisor that I should be a [insert a bizarre or inappropriate occupation]“.

Either the complaint is left at that, or frequently, the denouement is appended “and look at me now” or “and now I am a brain surgeon”. Or substitute an occupation with no bearing on the recalled recommendation.

Part of the problem is the selective memories of the complainants. Unusual occupational recommendations tend to be better recalled frequently excluding all other options.

In my experience it is very unusual for a career counselling process to result in the recommendation of only one option. More plausible or realistic suggestions are easily forgotten, especially if those options had already been entertained before the involvement of a careers counsellor.

We need to stop the guessing game and avoid prematurely putting students into categories and encouraging them to limit their searches.

A more fundamental problem, however, can be laid at the feet of the careers counsellors and the tools that they continue to use. Firstly complaining that a counsellor’s recommendations failed to match a subsequent career path belie misguided expectations about the predictive nature of career counselling.

Career counselling cannot predict the future. It cannot with any accuracy identify in what occupation a person will be employed in five years time or more.

This is not a particularly controversial point. Economists cannot with great accuracy predict the market, doctors cannot with great accuracy predict the course of a disease or who precisely will succumb to a particular disease. Life is complex, changeable and changing. Beware anyone who tells you otherwise.

Unfortunately, there remains a tendency to “oversell” tests that generate a shortlist of “recommended” or sometimes even “ideal” occupations based on answers to the test questions. Unless cautiously handled by a skilled counsellor, it is easy for recipients of the results to interpret these recommendations as determinative predictions.

However, the problem is more fundamental. Careers counsellors should not allow themselves to be put in the business of making predictions.

People and the world are unpredictable, non-linear, complex and ever-changing. While it is understandable that people seek certainty, especially if they feel unsure, making dubious predictions is not going to assist in the longer-term.

Rather, the focus should be on coaching clients to develop skills to explore, evaluate and act on opportunities as they arise, and to reflect continually on their own circumstances and motivations.

Ironically rather than trying to close the deal with narrowed-down vocational choices, encouraging open-minded exploration, and the skills to change direction if personal circumstances or external events like labour market forces dictate.

In other words, we need to stop the guessing game, particularly in school settings, and avoid prematurely putting students into categories and encouraging them to limit their searches.

Panichi makes a good point about unnecessarily narrowing the vocational aspirations of “children still finding their place in the world”. I’d extend that to adults as well. He also reminds us not to overlook the importance of doing work that is in demand, and it is a good point. However, it turns out demand continually and sometimes unpredictably changes too.

For these reasons, I have worked with some very talented colleagues at Become Education on a very different approach to career education with both primary-aged and high school students as well as adults, that does not push students (or adults) to make a specific career decision, instead it teaches them how to generate possibilities and test them.

That way, they can develop skills to design their futures rather than be given a label or a “matched” occupation and told that is their best option, a far better experience than the current alternative.

Dr Jim Bright, FAPS, is a director at IWCA and is Director of Evidence & Impact at edtech start up BECOME Education. Email to [e-mail]. Follow him on X/Twitter @DrJimBright

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