What does a good career counselor do?

• I have felt stuck in my career for a long time. Disregarding my better judgment, I took the advice of someone I trust and decided to see a career counselor. The experience went very poorly in my opinion and served only to reinforce my disbelief in the value of career counselors. But, I'm still feeling stuck, so I want to see what the hivemind's collective experience has been. Background: 28 yro male in NYC. The person I saw billed himself as a "career psychologist." He is a licensed psychologist but he is not a therapist. He used to work as head of the career services office of one of the better business schools in the city. He is very structured, selling his time in four-session packages. I made an effort to put as much into things as I could. He assigned homework that I spent many hours completing. During our third session he reviewed the results of my Myers Briggs and Strong Interest Inventory exams. The Myers Briggs revealed that I am an INTJ and the Strong Interest Inventory said that I'm basically only interested in technical subjects. The Myers Briggs came with a list of suggested career fields based upon my personality. With only a few exceptions, they were all fields that, for me to enter, would require a great deal of additional schooling. Meanwhile, during my initial consultation with the counselor he had assured me that I wouldn't need to go back to school for more than a class or two. It bears noting that the day of the third session, I was suffering from a depressive episode that had started a few days prior due to unrelated work matters (stress related). I told him that it would be a while until I went back for my fourth session as I needed to treat my depression and work issues are a trigger for me. I recovered from the depressive episode and scheduled the next appointment. However, I was very distressed by the homework for that final session. (This homework assignment is provided at the end of this question for reference.) It basically gave me a panic attack and made me really upset with the counselor. I was left with the feeling of having spent hours on homework for him, listing my values, skills, the books I like to read, etc. All of this work felt discarded. It felt like the first two or even three sessions I paid for didn't matter at all. Instead, all that really mattered was what came back on the Myers Briggs and meanwhile the careers listed on it were not practicable for switching into. I am wondering whether my experience was typical, or if the person that I saw was a charlatan. I am also wondering whether people have had positive experiences, and if so what specifically those experiences were. CAREER ASSESSMENT SUMMARY 1. List your six to eight strongest and most enjoyable skills: 2. List your six to eight most important career values: 3. What is your Life/Career Purpose now? 4. List your current career interest(s); you may list more than one, but, limit yourself to no more than six. CAREER EXPLORATION 5. List careers you want to explore; you may list more than one, but, limit yourself to no more than six. CURRENT CAREER FOCUS 6. List the career from your ‘career exploration’ that best ‘fits’ you. 7. Using your skills, values, interests, etc. list all the reasons why the career chosen in question 6 is the best fit for you. 8. What are your strongest and most threatening external and internal barriers to career change? External barriers may include: fierce competition, insufficient education, training and/or certification, finances, weak job market. Internal barriers may include: fear, confusion about how to strategize a career path, lack of confidence, perfectionistic, risk aversion. The key to dealing with career barriers is recognizing them and taking action. CURRENT CAREER STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION PLAN 9. How and when will you move towards actualizing your chosen career? List the specific activities and behaviors you will use to keep you motivated and focused on your career goal? Be as specific as possible. Include benchmarks. Think of yourself as an independent company called YOU Inc. Develop a personal ‘business plan’ to organize, fund, launch and market YOU Inc. Have fun!

• Answer:

  Hey there. IAAUCC, but NYCC. (I am a university career counselor, but not your career counselor). My generous interpretation is that your working relationship with the counselor is 'bad fit', because what the counselor is offering and the way he offered it doesn't entirely mesh to your needs. Briefly: are sort of offering to walk you through a career counseling overview, which isn't helpful because you sound like need a very specific thing unpacked for you: Specifically, it sounds like you need someone to teach you how to identify and explore what career options are available to someone with your skills and interests. The longer answer is this: I wrote about choosing a career counselor/coach in a http://ask.metafilter.com/238394/Recommendations-of-a-career-counselor#3456760. Basically, I think career counseling breaks down into four stages: 1. Self Exploration: What are my values, what is meaningful to me? What am I good at? 2. Career Exploration: What are career paths where I experience those things I value/am good at? 3. Job Search Strategies: How to I present myself as a strong candidate for those positions? 4. Professional Skills: I got that job, now how do I establish myself in my new job and succeed? It sounds like your career counselor was trying to get you through the first three stages in four hours worth of counseling, which is ambitious. It sounds like what would have helped you is not a myers briggs, because the issue wasn't self exploration for you (it sounds like you know what is meaningful to you and what you are good at). It sounds like you would have preferred your counselor drill down on stage 2: Career Exploration. In fact, in your case, I could see four appointments just exploring and discussing the information and skill development involved in Career Exploration, which covers things like - how do I identify 5-10 job titles that are a fit with my interests? Specific job titles, not overall career paths. A job title is something like a "QA compliance specialist at Merck" (I'm assuming you have a BA/BA in something science related, and that is a position that usually requires a BA/BS or MS). A career path, which the MBTI is more known for, is something like 'engineer' or scientist' - it's a little general. It sound you would have also appreciated understanding questions like: What does it mean to 'explore a career option'? How can I use linkedin to find opportunities? Professional associations? What does it mean to use 'my network'? What is an informational interview and how can I use it to get valuable information? What's the etiquette to approach people? What does the correspondence look like? How do I use the information I glean from those conversations? And after all that when I identify potential jobs, what exactly does it mean to 'research' them to assess that they are a good fit based on my values? What happens if there are 2-4 different possible paths that seem interesting? How to I choose? Ultimately, what criteria should I use to assess that I have successfully explored and identified career options that are a good fit for me? And that would be totally separate from say, you finally focusing on 1-3 different potential jobs, as that moves you into Job Search Strategies. Which includes information from his last question ( How and when will you move towards actualizing your chosen career? List the specific activities and behaviors you will use to keep you motivated and focused on your career goal?) Except I'm assuming if you knew what activities would be most effective, or what moves would be useful, you'd be doing them. So it sounds like for the job you actually pick when you pick it, you'd have liked to have known what professional steps were needed to move into that field. Perhaps you thought he'd tell you. As I said in that earlier post, almost all of the career counselors I know are either wide but not deep, or more interested and skilled in helping folks in one of the four stages. So based on what you've said, I'd say less 'charlatan' and more 'bad fit', because your counselor may be the 'wide but not deep' type of counselor who provides an overall framework rather than skill development around a specific stage. Or they are a counselor who really, really likes stage one: self assessment in general, more than being knowledgeable or interested in helping you navigate the other stages. (For example, he may not know specific job titles. ). Finally, as for your friend who recommended him, try not to be too hard on them, because what the counselor was offering (that overall framework and a lot of self exploration with a MBTI) may have been perfect for them. Or, perhaps that person was going into business, and the counselor could rattle off a kazillon job titles because they worked at a business school. Please know that almost all counselors are specialized. For example, I can name about 5 job titles for graduates out of business school. Maybe three for the arts? But I can rattle off a number of job titles and discuss career paths as well, but only for folks who cluster in the health professions/life sciences/global health/international development/international affairs, because that's my area. I'm a career counselor at a university. I don't take on private clients. And I do not know the counselor you saw, who could be phenomenal. But I will say that if I was that counselor, and came out of a business environment, after an initial conversation, if I knew that you were was pretty self aware about what you were good at, and wanted to know about career options where you would use that math/science/analytical interest (and my background was in business), I probably wouldn't have taken you on as a client, unless you had specifically said that you were interested in pursuing a business focused career. Because I don't think I'd really be able to help you in the way you wanted (with specialized insight into career exploration into those careers). But that's just me. But I will say that I think that final piece of homework was way too much to ask for in one go. That there is like an outline for a day long career seminar, and even if you did answer all of the questions, it would take me longer than an hour to unpack with a person. So, in short - not charlatan. But bad fit?