Career Choice and Career Counselling

 

Career Characteristics Knowledge Development

Career counselling using Enquire Within usually begins by asking the user to generate their cognitive map about careers they know. If he or she has a well-developed map, then you can use this to identify the characteristics of ‘my ideal career,’ ‘my least preferred career,’ etc. However, as many career counsellors know, it is often the case that people do not have particularly well-developed cognitive maps about careers - they may not know a wide variety of careers, and they may not have developed many dimensions on which to classify them. In such cases the counsellor would reflect these perceptions back to the user, and perhaps suggest some more dimensions the user might think about, and/or some careers which the user might not have considered. This application finds its natural home with career guidance officers at schools and colleges, but it is also very useful in redundancy counselling especially in organisations where people have expected to have lifetime careers and don’t know where to start looking for other careers or opportunities which may be open to them.

Career Choice Reasons

Reasons for career choice have been studied using Enquire Within: for example, the Health Department wanted to know why doctors persist in choosing particular specialities even though they are known to be overcrowded, and certain specialities are under resourced. The view of the Health Department was that they should try to correct these anomalies through using pay differentials, but the study clearly showed that pay was a much less important consideration than a number of other job-related factors. Another example using Enquire Within to examine reasons for career choice is a study conducted by a major retailing chain which was disturbed at the high level of turnover amongst its graduate recruits. Clearly, the organisation and the graduates had between them developed a major misperception of the demands and skills of the job; two days’ work with Enquire Within told them exactly what was wrong.

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Related Resources

• Using Personal Construct Theory in Guidance
• Career Choice a Grid Example
• Using repertory grid to allow individuals to express their understanding of themselves and the world around them by indicating who is important in their lives Professor David Canter, Director of Liverpool University's Centre for Investigative Psychology has a clearer idea of what makes a terrorist after interviewing a group of Islamic extremists in Pakistan. The project constructed psychological "profiles" to describe how Jihadists were led into their violence - BBC News.
• UOW study reveals workplace discrimination. An example of a Repertory Grid study.

• Personal Construct Counselling in Action (Counselling in Action series) - The authors of this clear and accessible volume outline the key principles of Personal Construct Theory. They discuss and illustrate how the starting point of counseling is a careful exploration of the ways in which a client construes his or her world through credulous listening to all the client says and does not say. They describe the range of methods which may be used to help a counselor and client learn about these constructions and their implications, including self characterizations and the repertory grid technique. In addition, the authors show how the counselor and client, together devise experiments for change through which the client can try out new and more rewarding ways of interpreting and acting. A number of approaches to facilitate change are discussed and exemplified,. The book concludes with a detailed case-study of the counseling process with one particular client. "This is an informative book which is concise, well written and with no shortage of clinical examples. It should be relevant to all who are interested in counselling and psychotherapy and it may just whet some appetites for more." --British Journal of Psychology "One of the excellent series 'Counselling in Action'. . . . If you want to know about Personal Construct counselling, this is for you." --Self and Society "The book provides a very readable introduction that is to be commended. The authors provide useful summaries of repertory grids, fixed role therapy, self-characterization, and other methods for helping people change." --International Review of Psychology

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