The jobs we find ourselves in, influence our self-esteem, financial security, ability to plan for our futures, and they put us in positions of meeting people, some of whom may stay in our lives for a long time.
Our vocational lives are a crucial aspect of personal satisfaction. It's worth devoting time and research to these decisions.
Career / Vocational Counseling helps you evaluate career paths. Whether you're facing your first choices as a young adult, or finding yourself wanting to change careers later, career counseling helps you look at the wider picture. We work on combining your personal preferences and self knowledge with the facts about training, and job conditions.
You may wonder why I am using both of these words , "Career and Vocation" to describe counseling about work .
I think of Vocation as a calling, and Career as the practical way to earn a living . We are lucky when we can meld the two.
For example, I know many visual artists, musicians, writers etc. whose art is their vocation and their passion, but they can't necessarily make a living at it so they find a career to pursue.. Often they choose a career that incorporates aspects of the vocation
They may teach, repair instruments, get into sales, edit, do grant writing, arts management. interior design, work in an art framing store, etc.
Figuring out one's work path is an important part of happiness and can be done at any age - the earlier the better. I help people find what career is right for them.
Why Counseling ? You can find out pretty much everything relevant to a career, by searching the web. You can easily learn salary projections, training requirements, statistics on future need for the job, and conditions of the job setting.
What you don't get from a dive into information, is the depth of your personal, feelings, and your unique characteristics that affect satisfaction at different jobs. I combine counseling skills with my practical knowledge of vocational information ( from being a school counselor ) to help the client come to a practical pathway.
Here is an example of how Career Counseling helped someone:
School Teacher to maybe School Counselor to Administrator:
I counseled a single mom in her mid-thirties. She was a high school teacher who wanted out of the classroom. She enjoyed talking with students and helping them with their problems, which came up during breaks in class schedule, or outside on the field during sports. She stretched this experience of being helpful to kids, to the idea of becoming a school counselor. She figured it would be a good move, and not too difficult a path to get the Masters while she continued teaching.
First, I helped her examine the realities of being a high school counselor, which is the grade level she wanted to remain at. After getting her counseling masters her salary would be the same as the teacher salary. This may not be the case everywhere but it was the reality in the city she lives in. The teacher salary in her city was pathetic, at the bottom end of all 50 states, with little prospect for improvement.
Next I talked with her about the daily duties of the high school counselor position, Her attraction to the job was based on wanting to get out of the pressure cooker of the classroom, and to be able to help kids one on one.
But the realities involved tasks she hadn't considered. There's the pressure of helping seniors get into college with on-time applications and recommendation letters, making sure students have the right credits to graduate, implementing class registration with complex software programs, dealing with failing grades, teaching vocational and mental health lessons in the classrooms, and the everyday issues of teens that can include homelessness, drug involvement, suicidal behavior, pregnancy, gender identity challenges, child abuse.
With debt from her Masters program, no bounce in salary, and a pile of new stressors, this single mom might regret her decision. I then suggested that she investigate a Masters in Administration.
The salaries for Admin start at $20,000 more than teaching and there's a wide variety of areas that an Administrator has access to, both at district level, and on site at the school. This variety assures that they can grow and add skills which is an insurance policy against burn-out. There's no shortage of stress at the Admin level though, and they have a great deal of responsibility. She looked at all of these aspects and made the decision.
All of this counseling with this single mother took only five sessions. Three years later I bumped into her at an inter-district counseling conference. She was now 38, had finished her Masters in Administration and secured a position as an Assistant Principal in a High School. For the first time , she was thinking she could buy a condo for her and her daughter. Oh, and because of her interest in counseling her principal put her in charge of the Counseling Department.
This is an example of combining a vocation, ie her calling to work with youth, with a good career path that has practical growth.
Other examples:
Working through a psychological issue preserved a good job:
I counseled a person who was ready to quit his job as a supervisor in a program he'd helped build. He thought he was burned out and that's why he was thinking of leaving, but it turned out, after we delved into it, that he was having an interpersonal conflict with an employee who was bullying him. Looking into this took him back to some childhood issues with bullying and we worked those through. Once he practiced being assertive, he switched out his approach and the employee backed down. He stayed in the job that he liked, and had built up financial security in.
Archetypes that attract us to certain jobs but can lead to burn-out:
Sometimes we are attracted to jobs because of archetypes we identify with such as hero, rescuer, healer, teacher. But we may find that the day in day out working at those jobs is too much on other systems in our constitution. It helps to understand the archetypes and weigh the benefits of those jobs against the deficits. This can be a situation in which the person comes to appreciate their need to help people but they don't want to do it full time. One client had this dynamic, decided to switch jobs to one with less interpersonal stress, and then volunteered at a crisis phpne line four hours a month, to fulfill their need to help people one on one .
The field of career counseling is so interesting - everyone's story is unique, What's yours?
I offer a free 10 minute consultation to determine if you can benefit from Career Vocation Counseling. If you decide to have sessions after that, the fee is $100 per hour long session. Phyllis Nasta 520 203-4968 You may have an Employee Assistance Program that pays for counseling. Check out your HR benefits.
