When you are at school, you have a vision of what you want to do when you grow up. But once we get past primary school, our focus often leaves us, and we are left sitting our GCSEs and A Levels, with no real sense of what to do next. Many of us then go on to get good A Level results and are accepted into the University of our choice.
Career Counselling for Graduates : What to Do Upon Graduation
As a university student you will no doubt have attended many fairs in your final year. Some will be lucky enough to have been recruited already. But what about those that are still lost, with no real direction. Having good exam grades is not enough for a real future in the field of work you like.
The worst situation here is that you have graduated in something you don’t even like. You may have like science or languages when you started your degree course. But, over the passing of time you may well have gone on to hate them. So, what to do next? You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a career that you really do not like at all. This is where a career counselling expert can step in.
Strengths and Weaknesses
A career counselling specialist will be able to determine whether or not you have chosen the right career path, and what to do about it if you are qualified in something you don’t like. He can also ensure that you take the correct route and way forward with your career.
Once we leave school, we have two options open to us. One is to go out to work and the second is to continue into higher education. For those of us who go out to work, we will often be ill-prepared. For those of us for choose university or college, we will become more and more ill-prepared the longer we wait to go out into the big wide world.
School and College Leavers
Depending on the school you attended you may have little or no previous experience in finding jobs, attending interviews, and coping with the world of work. Your career counsellor or coach can help you with all this, and much more. If you have no idea where to turn on the day that you graduate, you really are not alone. You and hundreds of others will have got as far as graduation day without having ever attended a formal interview.
Your counsellor will assess your strengths and weaknesses, and he will be able to determine what career suits you. As we said before, you may not have chosen the right studies, and you may need to continue to study in order to switch to a career that you actually like. Thankfully, it is never too late, and many people make the decision of a career move when they are in their 40’s or even older.
Support and Encouragement
Another common problem is that you may know what you want to do, but don’t know how to get there. You may be afraid to set goals for yourself, and therefore never get to the place that you really want to be. A counsellor will be able to work with you, to give you the support you need, and to find your weaknesses, and a way to cope with them and to start achieving your goals.
There is an alarmingly large percentage of college and university graduates in the UK that end up doing a job they hate, or indeed one that they are not even qualified to do. Many will end up with a degree and never put it to use. So, if you don’t want to be the next statistic, ensure you use career counselling for graduates for your new job and for your future.