The Career Counselor's Handbook by Howard Figler

Author:Howard Figler [Bolles, Richard Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60774-355-2
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Published: 2011-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Just one word of warning: If you’re going to browse the Internet, respect its addictiveness. Be sure to set yourself a time limit before you begin, and keep to that discipline. The Internet should be a part of your life, not the whole of your life.

III. THE FUTURE: SOME HUNCHES

In the thirty-six years that I have been involved with career counseling, I have seen it become a broader field, with more options for counselors to choose from, and more options for job-hunters to choose from.

Side by side with the old ways, still, are the new ways.

One new way has been the evolution of career coaching alongside career counseling. It takes years to become a good counselor. But you can get certified as a coach in one long weekend. (Or you can take three years; it depends on the quality of the training.) The certification is available everywhere (try putting career coaching certification training into your favorite Internet search engine, and see what you turn up!). And while good coach-training emphasizes that there is a strong line between coaching and counseling, that line tends to get more and more fuzzy, as time goes on.

Another new way is the trend toward doing career coaching or counseling over the telephone, instead of face-to-face in your office. This has of course been going on for a long time. Thirty years ago, a job-hunter might phone his or her counselor the night before an interview, to get some last-minute tips or to ask some last-minute questions. But the rest of the time, career counseling would take place face-to-face.

What is different today is that in some cases, career counseling is being conducted exclusively over the phone from start to finish. Some counselors now report that they haven’t laid eyes on over 90 percent of their clients and wouldn’t know them if they bumped into them on a street corner.

This “phone-counseling” or counseling at a distance is in its infancy; but it seems likely it will grow in the future. Why?

The so-called global economy will inevitably accelerate the trend. After all, I may be a job-hunter in some remote village, with a population of only 85, in France or in China, and still find the best career counseling—or at least the best career phone-counseling—there is, anywhere in the world, as long as I have the Internet on my desk. That could turn out to be a Godsend.

It can be a Godsend also for counselors or coaches who find themselves living in a very small town. Where are they to find clients? Well, if you are in this situation, you are no longer limited by geography. The world, as Thomas Friedman writes, is flat. Through your website, you can advertise your services and expertise to the world.

IMHO—in my humble opinion—those career counselors and coaches who are just entering the field should steer clear of telephone counseling, which I call distance-counseling, until they are much more experienced and at the top of their game. It is altogether too easy

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