Don’t Bother Seeing a Career Counselor?

As I look back on my 6,000 career counseling clients, I have reluctantly concluded that my efforts could have been better spent.

Let me explain. Career counselors mainly do two things:

Help people find well-suited careers

That is done using some combination of client self-report, counselor questions, assignments to read and watch videos about careers, job shadowing, and such instruments as the Strong Interest Inventory, Holland Self-Directed Search, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Ironically, the most valid predictor of school and career success, the intelligence test, the so-called IQ test, is rarely used. That’s ironic because despite accusations, such tests actually overpredict real-world performance for underrepresented groups. Even tests such as the SAT, which are highly correlated with IQ get too little attention from career counselors.

The problem with career counseling is that the recommendations too rarely go beyond what clients already know about themselves, for example, that they’re more of a word-person than a numbers or fix-it/build-it person. And to the extent that the recommendations go beyond what the clients already know, the advice is too often wrong.

Additionally, even if the information is accurate, it too rarely leads to the person landing a job and succeeding in the career. For example, many people’s skills, interests, and values suggest that they should pursue a career in a field that has long odds of even paying back student loans, let alone yielding a middle-class living, for example, journalism, music, art, or sports. Or a career that require too many years of expensive schooling.

In addition, many unanticipatable factors can outweigh an ostensibly well-chosen career, for example, declined job market, ill-matched employer, boss, coworkers, or customers. I recall a client who was good in science and math, loved animals, and wanted to be a helpful person. She went to college pre-vet, got into UC Davis’ vet school, which is among the most selective, and became a vet. But slowly, seeing animals die, sometimes because their owner wouldn’t pay for expensive surgeries, wore away at her and she changed careers and now is more contented as an accountant.

I would like to be able to suggest a way of revising career counseling so it’s more helpful, but I can’t think of one. It’s not a useless endeavor. Indeed, career-finding counseling usually does provide clients with some insight into themselves and they do get increased probability of a well-suited career, but it feels that many other careers would yield more benefit than being a counselor that helps people choose a career.

Help clients land a job

I have even more concern about this part of career counseling. If a job-search coach helps a client land a job, it means that someone else doesn’t get it. The problem is that if you’re an effective job-hunt counselor, you make the client look better than s/he actually is. Of course, that deprives the more worthy candidates who couldn’t afford a coach or who chose to present themselves without a job-search counselor’s primping tactics. And not only does the rejected employee thereby suffer, so does the employer, coworkers, and often, customers. We all benefit when the best person for the job gets hired. That affects the quality of the products and services we use from our iPhone to medical care, from the service we get from government to the service we get from the car mechanic.

Of course, sometimes a client really is more meritorious than might appear if s/he hadn’t been coached, a diamond in the rough. But that’s the exception. So I believe that job-search coaches actually make the world, net, worse.

On-the-job coaching

Most career counselors spend little time helping people succeed and find contentment in their current employment. I do a fair amount of that but still don’t feel great about it because getting people to change is hard.

Take even something as concrete as getting a long-winded person to be more concise. They will readily agree that they’ve paid a price, professionally and personally, for being long-winded and want to change. But it too rarely happens. I help them change by exploring the root cause of their long-windedness, and inviting them to use the Traffic Light Rule: green for 30 seconds, yellow for the next 30, red after that. They all like that. If they don’t have a good sense of how long 30 or 60 seconds is, they practice with a timer. To keep their desire for concision in mind, I might even have them rate themselves after each conversation. Yet, usually, within a day or two, they’re back to their voluble self.

In sum, while there’s a need for career counseling, I’ve concluded that the current crop of methodologies are too often ineffective or unethical.

If you want career help, you might first explore Career OneStop and/or try talking with a wise, good-listening friend who knows you well.

It’s too late for me to change careers and my clients insist that I am of benefit, and I enjoy working with them. But if I were starting over, I would have studied to become a genetics researcher.

I read this aloud on YouTube.

You can reach career and personal coach Dr. Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net