CAREER COUNSELING

Career Counselling

Career Counselling

Counselling

Counselling helps an individual, couples and families create and maintain a safe and nurturing environment, promote family cohesion and harmony, and provide for the basic needs of the family members so that each can achieve his/her own optimal level of functioning. Services include single parent support, parent/child counselling and couples counselling. Counselling is one of the most rewarding ministries that a pastor can be involved in. It can also be one of the scariest - and potentially one of the most damaging to a pastor's ministry. Many pastors have taken a program of study that dealt more with the theological end of ministry than it did with personal one-on-one confrontation. Trained counsellors provide services to individuals ranging in age from as young as six to teens and adults, and to our senior citizen population. Therapy can address any issue that prevents a happy, fulfilling life such as confliction interpersonal relationships, depression, anger, anxiety and panic attacks, adolescent problems, sexual assault and childhood disorders (Whiston 2002 218-237).

Professional counselling

Professional counselling helps people bring about positive change in their lives and their relationships. It helps them solve relationship problems, deal with work dilemmas, confront health challenges, face traumatic events, and make important life changes. Counselling allows you to explore important issues and gain objective guidance on how to progress in your journey. A skilled counsellor provides unconditional acceptance, objective feedback, and reassuring support. In short, counselling helps you become emotionally and psychologically healthy and better able to live the life you want to. Most people can benefit from counselling at some point in their life.

Definition(s) of career counselling

Counselling is a way of enabling choice or change or of reducing confusion.' I find that this connects particularly well to my argument of pro fusion of career and personal counselling skills, especially 'seeing the client in a private and confidential setting', 'loss of a sense of direction or purpose', and finally but most importantly 'by listening attentively and patiently' which, in my experience as a career counsellor, are two of the most important personal counselling skills needed to enable a client to open up to me (Osipow 2003 247-442), also recognise the importance of personal counselling skills. 'Career counselling requires all the basic counselling skills of listening, responding with respect and empathy, asking open questions and summarising...' Zytowski (2001a 57-65), also back and support this argument. 'The (counselling) skills are fundamental in establishing the essential trust in the relationship, clarifying issues of importance to the client and beginning to work on these issues to a point where the client can take continued action independently.'

Personal Counselling

(Osipow 2003 247-442) argue that '"career" and "personal" counselling should not be viewed as different types of counselling because (1) the holistic philosophy of counselling emphasizes helping whole persons whose lives contain many important and meaningful roles and (2) recent research on the implications of gender and race for career development further demonstrates the inseparability of career and personal lives'. Swanson & Parcover (2008 98-134) also reinforces this ...