Career Counseling 2.0

Career Counseling is pertinent as Career is the most important decision of one’s life and often people are lost with how to choose what they should commit their life to.

This is how typical Career Counseling happens:

• The Counselor tells you that you have some skills and interests which possibly even you do not know. So he or she is going to give you a psychometric test or talk to you or use your finger prints or some other method to identify those deep hidden skills and interests.
• Next the Counselor will use his or her wisdom to match your skills and interests against all possible Careers in the world to make a recommendation.

This does sound logical but unfortunately it is just wrong at many levels:

1. Every human being is a result of his or her experiences. I was born an Engineer and until the penultimate year of my schooling I used to straight fail at everything except Science and Maths. If I was born in a different family and grew up in a different eco system I would have been completely different.
2. Personality evolves well into 30s. So what is the point of measuring something which is still evolving.
3. How can one Counselor know everything about every Career in the world? Specially when we have Google to cross check.

Career Counseling needs to evolve. First and foremost we need to understand that our role as Educators is not to take Career decisions for people but to enable them to take their own Career decisions. Second, we have to humbly agree that the Expert model is obsolete. Every Career has become so nuanced that even a professional working in it for all his life can only have a perspective on the Career and not claim to be an expert.

LifePage — world’s most evolved online Career Counseling platform has created an ecosystem around these two fundamental beliefs. It connects students with real professionals so that they can develop a first hand understanding of any Career. Second, it provides the possibility to scientifically predict which Career is best for an individual on the basis of introspection on the new found awareness.