Why Career Counseling Clients Fail

How-to writers tend to present success stories. I’m guilty of that. But of course, much can be learned from failure. 

So in my PsychologyToday.com article today, I describe common ways in which career counseling clients fail and what individuals and counselors can do to help.

Helping Your Child Explore Careers

In this, Part II of my four-part series on career advice for boys and men, I discuss how parents can help their sons and daughters to explore career options. As usual, it's in PsychologyToday.com.

Days of Our Worklives: Part III: Adam's Saga. Episode 3: Early Career Clues?

Days of Our Work Lives

Part III: Adam's Saga

Episode 3

Early Career Clues?

In the previous episode, Ben and Susan had their biggest fight ever: about how much to try to tame Adam's "natural maleness." Indeed the school was trying: A strong case can now be made that school is not boy-friendly.

Adam was really helped by Susan convincing the school to let him skip the 5th grade, going straight from 4th to 6th. With Adam now on Ritalin and willing and able to be compliant, the school could no longer blame his boredom on ADHD.  

Indeed, for most of the school day, Adam had good reason to be bored. With teachers rewarded and punished mainly for raising low-achievers' performance and not for helping above-average kids live up to their potential, most teachers allocate little time to meeting the needs of kids like Adam. The easiest thing for the school to do was let such kids skip a grade. And that's what they did with Adam, let him start middle school early--It was good for him and made the teacher's life easier.

Having struggled with their careers, Ben and Susan's nightly "What did you do in school today?" discussions often focused on trying to unearth career clues for Adam:  Susan reasoned, "If Adam could pick a well-suited career early, he could focus on that and so have a better chance of success." Ben added, "When there were plenty of good jobs, that was unnecessary but that won't be true in Adam's lifetime."  

Indeed, the already declining number of good jobs will likely accelerate: Ever more good jobs are being roboticized, offshored, and chopped up into temp projects to avoid paying benefits and to reduce employee lawsuits.

One night, Adam came home excited that his science teacher, of all people, spent the lesson talking about how President Obama's influencing operation goes about creating messages that influence not-liberal voters, for example, couching even radical proposals as what The Founders intended in the constitution. Wanting to nourish a potential career interest, Ben bought Adam the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, one of the 29 eminent members of Obama's dream team of messaging. Good try but Adam never cracked open the book. Perhaps if Adam had been older.

One night, Adam told of his class's field trip to a science museum. He exclaimed, "I want to be a an environmental biologist!" He then unfurled a poster of endangered cute  animals he bought at the museum gift shop. Ben asked, "Did the exhibits explain that today and especially tomorrow, environmental science is mainly math--you know, formulas and spreadsheets analyzing big data on computers?' Adam's face dropped.

Then there was the night Adam said he had asked his teacher, "Isn't is racist that there are so many negative stories about Muslim countries?" The teacher somehow didn't answer the question and so he asked Susan and Ben. They too avoided the question and turned their focus to trying to help Adam identify a career direction. Susan asked, "Think you might like a career studying the Middle East for the State Department? Working for the CIA? Being a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at a university?  Adam said, "Can I take Casanova for a walk?"

Maybe middle school is too early to expect a child to think much about career. But high school wasn't.

The next episode is HERE.

Helping Your Child or Grandchild Choose a Career

The parent's nightmare: having spent a fortune to send a kid to college only to find her or him, after graduation or dropping out (half do,) back on the sofa career-clueless.

What to do?

To preempt the problem, start encouraging career exploration early--age 5 isn't too young. The schools should do this but alas, they're ever more obsessed with just preparing students for more school. Start by taking your child on field trips to see people doing the sorts of work you could envision your child doing. For example, if your child is a people person, you might visit a corporate salesperson and a nonprofit manager. If your child is a hands-on type, you might visit a biomedical equipment technician and a surgeon. Too busy to take such field trips, find on-target career videos using GoogleVideo.

Encourage your child, whether in elementary school or college, to ask the teacher's permission to do term papers and projects that would help them explore a career. For example, if teacher assigns a term paper on the use of the doppelganger in literature, your child might ask if he might instead do one contrasting the way architects are treated by various authors.

During the summers, I recommend against sending a high schooler to a prestigious college's summer program for high school students. The last thing teenagers need is more school and it will have little or no impact on their college admissibility. I would also discourage classic teen summer jobs such as scooping ice cream in favor of asking yourself, "What friend or relative might give my child a paid or volunteer opportunity that would allow him to explore a possible career?"

I suggest that your child select a tentative major before deciding which colleges to apply to--it can help determine what college to attend. A great master list of majors and the colleges offering them are HERE.

Also remind your child that college is a bad place to try to figure out what you should be when you grow up. Remember, professors are people who deliberately opted out of the real world so they can pursue arcane research projects of interest to only the handful of other similar researchers. Instead of relying on courses and professors to guide your child's career choice, encourage your child to play around in the campus career center and/or have them identify candidate careers by perusing the annotated lists of careers in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, (bias alert here), my Best Careers lists on usnews.com, and the 500+ careers in my book, Cool Careers for Dummies. Each of those offers a profile of lots of careers followed by a suggested website or book for additional information.

But what if it's too late for all that? Your kid is back on your sofa, career-clueless, still trying to "find himself," perhaps even proposing that cliche of cliches: a trip overseas to "find myself." Beware: Having been career coach to many such people, seeking beyond the summer after graduation usually increases inertia and confusion. A second warning : Do not encourage that inaction by supporting your child through his "period of discovery." It usually engenders the same torpor than renders trust-fund babies and welfare recipients inert.