Career Development Programs and Services in Schools - Essay Example

Career Development Career Development Programs and Services in Schools Historically speaking, counseling is not a new phenomenon; initially it had started in the discipline of psychology, or a branch of behavioral psychology. “Counseling has its beginnings, both historically as an emerging discipline and daily as a particular activity, in many different professions. It fills the space between psychotherapy and friendship, and it has become a recognized extension of the work of almost everyone whose business touches upon the personal, social, occupational, medical, educational and spiritual aspects of people” (Noonan, 2002, p.vii). We cannot deny the importance of career development (Patton & McMahon, 2001). It leads us to the right way or direction and helps us in choosing a career for us. It helps us in deciding which occupation is most suitable for us according to our personality. Through career development, we can also judge our mental capabilities, our area of interest and so on. In modern era, life is going very fast day by day, in this scenario, career guidelines and career development centers are very productive to helping the students. In the hustle bustle of life, adults become very confused and disorientated, cannot able to recognize their own interest. They need some proper channel for choosing their career. In this proposal I have focused on the development of the adult students in the schools. If the adults have got proper training or guideline from the schools, resultantly they will become very much clear about their direction. Career development is very necessary for the well being of the character of the students. It enhances their abilities and refined their thoughts. “Career development is the planning of one’s career and the implementations of the career plans by means of education, trainings, jobs, search and acquisition, and work experiences. If we look at the process more from the perspective of the organization, the career development is the process of guiding the placement, movement, and growth of employees through assessment, planned training activities, and planned job assignments” (Garavan, 1990). Career guidance comes under the field of counseling which places an emphasis on the significance of curiosity. The basis of a career decision happens to be the knowledge that you have of your own self and the way you project yourself into the future. A consideration is also taken of the skills, preferences and requirements. Through it the anxieties and assumptions of the future have a great impact upon them. These have an important link with the past and they are the determination of the degree to which the options are flexible and adventurous. The decision procedure is made further complicated and formidable due to the initial decisions being made when there is a lot of ambiguity. In the modern world career guidelines and development provide services for the students, for giving them a proper understanding regarding their future that also highlights their hidden capabilities, build confidence in them and also support to awaken the sense awareness in them. Now days, each and every school has a campus counselor, and career placement counselor, who guide the students in right directions When we think about the requirement that is there of holding on to personal continuity, we go back to the beginning. Adolescence as the conversion stage at which time the childhood is to be given up for making way for adulthood. However, it is to be done such that “the present incorporates the past and anticipates the future” (Noonan, 2002, p.27). Summarizing this it can be said that the there is a battle between the reluctance and the readiness to give up the old. The former is because of it being comfortable and familiar while the readiness is because of there being exciting possibilities. There is the fear of the future due to the unexplored realm that obviously inspires. When a person comes across such conflicting pulls, there is a shifting of his inside pictures and forces and a corresponding alteration in the conduct and relationships. It is the duty of counselor to guide the students in friendly manner, because there is the transitional period between the adolescence and adulthood, during this period students need special attention of their parents and teachers to guideline. There is a campus counselor in every school not only in the developing countries but also in underdeveloped countries. In the friendly atmosphere of counseling services provided by career development, student learns many skills, which developed interpersonal skills in the student. Adolescence is a stage of transition. During this transition one gets heightened feelings of anxiety and also doubt which are mixed with excitement. There is a requirement of relinquishing the common manners through relation is made to the others and of the familiar concepts about the self plus the world, because of them being obsolete. However, there are not any certain substitutes. “Attempts hold on to old patterns result is disconcerning and frustrating experiences” (Noonan, 2002, p.2) and this is because there is happening a continuous change in the world and the traditional stand puts a person out of step. In the adolescence period, children are more carefree about things such as career, professions, higher degree, moving in social circles as compared to in the adulthood. Because in this period when students are near to pass out schools and get involved into the higher studies, they must be very much clear about the area , that they are going to choose. Techniques used by counselor in career development. The counselor must approach some different techniques that are easy to understand by the client/ student. Some psychological techniques also used by some counselor. It helps them to understand the complexities of one individual. It also helped to motivate them in positive direction, some behavioral strategies used for the self esteem of the students. School is considered to be the first institution of learning after the infancy period. In children, we have seen the element of curiosity in them than the elders. We should encourage this curiosity of knowing something. Many a times in schools students are restricted to ask questions from the teacher. This is a very discouraging aspect. In one way or another you are under estimating the students, and you intimidate the curiosity about knowing something new. The term curiosity has several meanings to it. However, in this case it can be used for denoting keenness toward learning. The start of inventions, discoveries, explorations, studies and new progress is through curiosity. Similar to the way technical progress depends upon a person thinking about or questioning the reason, individual development depends on our desire of knowing more regarding our person and the world around. The significant thing is the desire to know. It can be a safety in the face of satisfaction plus the distress of the information or experience being thrust upon the person. When a person wants, he retains the initiative and exerts a certain degree of control upon whatever happens to us. Through this curiosity individual also knows about himself in better way. This is an miserable element that we always wants to know about other human beings, we always interested in what others are doing , rater than our own self. Here we have lost our dignity of our being. We always took our identity from the others. The curiosity is the first step towards the knowledge. It opens a new horizon, a new world of knowledge to know about your own self and also the world around you. Every person is responsible for his history and is the result of it. The way he exists in the present is a result of his previous experiences that have obviously shaped him. In relation to the social level, whether a person grows up in a city or on the rural side; has rich parents or poor ones; belongs to an intact or a broken home; has a criminal or a religious subculture; each of the elements lead to the person viewing money, truth, the climate, aspiration, food, free will, etc, in a very certain manner the whole life. Through the career development programs that are conducted in schools helps students in different way. They used different strategies i.e. conducted seminars, workshops, alumni, conferences, organizational work and so on. The career counseling has been established to provide the students with an opportunity to have a single point of contact in case they are need advice and help with a number of areas. There are number of counseling centers working for the betterment of the students, adults, professionals and etc. These centers facilitate the students in finding the right career path, advice on how to build an effective resume, interview skills, hoe to deal with office politics, hoe to deal with different situation work, how to effectively follow up after an interview., change in career advice. Career counseling is more or less like a personal training (Bradley & Ladany, 2001), it helps us to build interpersonal skills in ourselves. Counselor might be playing different role at a same time i.e. coordinator, administrator, management, and counselor. They approach different groups or classes for career planning. Sometime they used to conduct different session for different age groups, like the people they have targeted are, schools students, university students, corporative sectors, professionals and so on. They sole aim for all these are to enhance the interpersonal skills and to develop a positive self concept. Career counseling also helped to asses the mental health of individual, how mentally healthy he is? How strongly he controlled his mental slackness. It gives the opportunity individual to transform himself, to overcome his deficiencies. Also strengthen the self-esteem of an individual. Self esteem is kind of feeling or awareness of a person about himself and his ability to move in society efficiently. The mentally well adjusted person feels that he is an accepted part of society. When someone is absolutely there for the customer he puts all his emotional, intellectual, perceptual and intuitive capacities at his service. He makes use of them for understanding the way it would feel if it was him in his world. He also uses them for recognizing with him as well as his dynamic circumstance, and at the same time staying outside his world. It can be said that attention is free floating but is disciplined. It can readily pick up any slight, unspoken message from the customer, and can readily detail on it through experiment with relations and then test it keeping it in front of the assumptions for feeling and understanding the exchange. There is the requirement of an emotional attempt at becoming much immersed within the mechanism of another individual and a greater effort is required for remaining involved and at the same time, detached. There is the need of the supposedly opposing actions of “letting go of yourself” (Noonan, 2002, p.67), and keeping in mind your person. The customer has to essentially be making sure that the counselor stays within his personal limitations and does not lose himself in his world – he has to be remaining much away and detached from him. It is the duty of the counselor to polish the skills of the students, enhancing their intellectual abilities, motivate towards the education, and also highlight their other curricular skills. All this could be done through the speech therapy with the student. Free association / free speech is the method used in psychotherapy, in which client is free to speak anything, it opens the complexities of client to the counselor. What are the deficiencies in the individual? It also reveals some past complexities to the counselor, some traumatic circumstances of one’s past. It gives the self appraisal. The one method used for this is the aptitude test; through this an individual can better understand his interest. It cannot be implied that counseling is simply a job – it is work. A counselor has “a task, a purpose” (Noonan, 2002, p.76). There can also be a contract and the possibility of there being success depends upon how capable the two persons are of working in a mutually dependent way and they also have to have a clear notion of why they are present there. Just like in some other working relationship, every kind and level of relating is present among the customer and counselor at the same time, and these all interact, overlap, merge and conflict. Contrasting to the majority of the work, no matter how often there is the subject of the work being the relationship, the proof of the person interaction happens to be the most efficient information in order to deal with the basic work of assisting a customer in dealing with the troubles he has. Students’ behaviors also count in the career development, because the student’s behavior and mentality also varies from student to student. In this age students passed through different emotional experiences, and disorientated towards their career. It is necessary for the students, that they should be clear in their minds and their self appraisal. The “healthy” personality can be said to be a dynamic mechanism and it undergoes changes all the time while the person makes a relation to the other people, to the intentions, to happenings and his own person. He is supposed to be ready for coping with the altering plus developing happenings and there are various mechanisms present which assist him in the maintenance of a degree of equilibrium. This relates to the fact that even if an individual is healthy, he is disturbed, and this is what allows for our alertness, liveliness and interest. However, such an essential tension is said to be hardly noticeable and even enjoyable. The advantage of the career development counseling is that you have to ask some question before choosing the career. It gives a chance to getting to know oneself. Who am I? What kind of person I am? What kind of skills I have possessed? What I like and want to do and what not? Which area is most suitable for me? Young people find the question of personal identity very important. Therefore, the counselor has to be having the ability of distinguishing among the individuals who need to find themselves for the first time and the ones who simply have to reshape themselves. This means that there are some who have not been grounded properly in their individual experience and there are those who have an idea about themselves in spite of being confused and anxious. This refers to the return toward the international stage of development for looking further closely at the creation of ego (Noonan, 2002). It also gives an opportunity to assess one’s self, one’s strength and weaknesses, to identify oneself, one’s values, set goals and hoe to achieve those goals, what are the implementations for achieving this goals. The career planning workshops are also held for the betterment of the students. References Bradley, L. J., & Ladany, N. (2001). Counselor supervision: principles, process, and practice. Taylor & Francis. Garavan, T. N. (2001). Promoting strategic career development activities: Some Irish experience. Industrial and Commercial Training, 22(6): Noonan, E. (2002). Counselling young people. Routledge. Patton, W., & McMahon, M. (2001). Career development programs: Preparation for lifelong career decision making. Aust Council for Ed Research. Read More