Curious About Career Counseling?

No one really wants to work a job. Certainly, many people have jobs. One has to, if one wants to be financially independent and fend for themselves in this economy. But no one wants to simply work a job. Rather, people would much rather be able to have a career.

Of course, not everyone knows how to get a career.

Is it just a job that you do for a long time?

Is it something more?

And perhaps most importantly, what can you do to help you get the career you want?

The answer is career counseling.

Before getting into how career counseling can help you, it helps to know what the difference between a job and a career actually is.

A career isn’t just a job you do for a long time. It’s not even necessarily a job that you can advance in. It’s more specifically a job that allows you a path to continued employment over your life, and is able to grow and change as your own life grows and changes.

That sounds a bit complicated, but it’s easier than you might think. For example, many people consider fast food jobs a potential career, since you can go from simple employee to manager with a bit of hard work and dedication. However, while it’s true that some people do manage to make a career in fast food, the real truth is that fast food isn’t a very good career. Why? Because the advancement is somewhat laughable, and while you could go from an employee to a manager, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’d go from a store manager to any kind of higher position in the business.

Meanwhile, many people might consider something like an accountant to be a good career. It’s possible that it could be. After all, being an accountant gives you access to new and interesting aspects of the financial sector. It can certainly allow for some solid cost of living wage increases. From that standpoint, it could be a very good career.

However, it may also be just a job if you approach it from the standpoint that it’s a good way to make money while you figure out what else to do with your life. It doesn’t need to be a career, and for many people, it isn’t. So it’s important to understand that just because something can be a career, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be.

How Can Career Counseling Help?

So then comes the important question. Namely, what can career counseling do for you? What good is paying for a career counselor when you may not even know what you want to do?

Yet that is precisely why you should get career counseling. A trained career counselor will do more than simply help set you up with an employment center. What they do is actually designed to help you figure out what kind of career you have the skills for.

If you fear you don’t have any skills for a career, don’t worry. The dedicated career counselor can take a full assessment of your skills, talents, and interests, and figure things out based on that. Even if you don’t currently have the skills to start with the career that’s best suited for you, a good career counselor can help you find out how to get those skills, and more importantly, precisely what skills you need.

Or, to put it another way, career counselors help you get set on the right path, no matter where you currently are. So if you want to ditch the job and get an actual career, consider getting career counseling. It could be the best thing you ever did.