The Process – A Collaboration

Look at your whole situation, the internal and the external – what has shaped your past career directions and fostered newer aspirations.

I provide counseling, information and referrals, but not placement. I believe that with good preparation and utilization of available resources, the individual should be able to arrive at that goal independently. Nonetheless, I am prepared to work with clients for extended periods of time, as long as their career concerns remain a priority.

Assessment – the Key

Increasing someone’s capacity for self-understanding begins with the assessment.

I use both accepted instruments: the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Indicator and also a number of paper exercises designed to identify the personal and general concerns, abilities and skills of each individual. This very personal assessment is one of idea collection and organization, research, developing options, exploring, deciding, exploring again, reflecting, developing resources, planning, acting, reviewing progress and results, reflecting, and re-starting.

I prefer accompaniment with consulting, so that the process becomes collegial rather than directive. At a certain point, with some idea of the outlines of what is an interesting direction, we jointly develop action steps.

Focus, plan, then search

With a better idea of the forces that motivate and restrain to provide some direction setting, we can get down to some planning – the stuff that people usually associate with career counseling: the tell-me-what-I-should-do type of counseling. Except with the look at the inside, the outside looks very different, and we consequently do different things.

At this stage we would use a variety of exercises, but almost certainly build a personal mission statement and a vision for the future. While a mission statement is often something simple, the vision piece embodies consideration of a large number of things.

What most experience with this process is that there’s a lot of looping around back to self assessment – “I thought I liked the creative industries, but that’s really not secure enough for me. I really value security of income more than the glitz of the creative.” Iteration of vision is the key to designing a life, bringing your own purpose to work.

With each investigation, the level of self-understanding gets more developed and the capacity to narrow the field of options gets more distinct.

With that enhanced focus, the efforts to get on with a more earnest search – actually talking to people about work – takes center stage.