There are many career counselors in Connecticut and elsewhere who are not particularly helpful. They collect data and provide information. But, they lack insight and intuitive powers. As such, they might take an inventory of skills and interests and then suggest traditional jobs that match those fields.
“You like math. Consider engineering.”
Maybe. But, that’s nowhere nearly enough. The person might have a highly extroverted personality and a preference for making decisions based on emotion more than analysis. Both of these attributes might make engineering a non-fit.
In addition, many career counselors simply have not kept up with the cutting edge industries that have transformed the work place. The new world of work has created industries, jobs, and career paths that are simply different than even a decade ago. Some of our clients have come to us after telling their past career counselor that search engine optimization interested them and receiving a blank stare in return.
You need a counselor with both the abilities to guide and the knowledge of the new world of work to guide effectively in the present.
That is where we will help. We endeavor to literally change the lives of our clients.
Past patterns matter when giving advice. Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, a brilliant book on this issue. In a nutshell, experts are defined as such because they have thousands of past patterns in their brain bank. This enables experts to quickly examine a situation based on almost instantaneous leveraging of those patterns. Doctors perhaps best represent such expertise in their ability to diagnose a patient based on a few symptoms.
Expert career counselors have the same capacity. In our case, we have worked with thousands of college graduates in Connecticut who have been searching for career guidance. We are able to leverage our knowledge and provide strategic guidance based on our past success.
Why would you get a career counselor for your child?
The main reason: you are probably not a very good career counselor – at least for your child!
Symbolically, parents are the unconditional provider of love and nurturing. Career guidance is often misinterpreted as orders or judgment from the parent.
In comparison, we have well developed expertise in helping young adults chart their career path and we do not suffer from having parental baggage that clouds the career discussion.
This expertise emanates from a decade of college and career counseling thousands of young adults.
Our process is proprietary in nature but involves a combination of interviewing and personality profiling to help our clients figure out their path. After we understand our clients, we provide a strategic advisory plan to help our clients reach their path.
In terms of our interviewing process, there are aspects of personality profiling testing that cannot quite capture the values, background, and idiosyncratic outlooks of our career counseling clients. For that reason, services that only have computer generated profiling systems almost always provide advice that is too generic to be helpful.
To be clear, we find many of these tests both fun and somewhat helpful. Indeed, from our own business model, it would make far more sense to take the labor out of our work and rely purely on computer generated testing. From an effectiveness standpoint, however, we find the interview process critical to provide tailored, customized advice.
With that said, while we value our interviewing process and believe it differentiates us in effectiveness from the career sites that only provide testing, we definitely believe that career personality profiling tests are helpful in providing information and data points.
Sometimes the information can be extraordinarily insightful and our clients will have breakthrough moments of self-awareness. Strangely, unless questioned in ways that validated tests do, many people do not fully understand their own internal preferences.
The combination of advisory services, through interviewing and discussion, plus career personality profiling tests provides the most effective way to help our clients.
Upon helping our Connecticut clients with their career counseling needs, we provide concrete, direct advice on what fields best match; what should be done to move into the field; and, as needed, help with resume, interviewing, and job searching.