How to Conduct a Career Counseling Session?

Imagine this – you’re a regular student who is currently being bombarded with advice and information about the best career path for you. You’re confused, stressed, anxious and worried about your future. You muster up the courage to discuss your situation with your parents and/or teacher. Together, you decide to opt for a guidance solution like Mentoria, really hoping to find the answers you’re desperately looking for.

What expectations do you think such a person brings to a career counselling session? It would be a life-altering experience for them, wouldn’t it? After all, it will help them decide the course of their future!

As a career counselling professional, it is important to acknowledge the magnitude of change you effect with every session. You need to know what exactly you’re going to offer to your client, and make sure you’re optimising the session for them. Wondering how you can do that? Shipra Dhar, Head of Counsellor Quality at Mentoria, has some answers!

Looking for the answers to your questions about your career? Take Mentoria’s holistic psychometric career assessment test to get one step closer and discover your ideal career based on your unique interests, skills and personality!

How to conduct the ideal counselling session

1. Analyse the Report

Counsellors must first analyse each client’s assessment report. Their interests, personality and abilities must be studied in detail, mapping their strongest and weakest subdomains. Going through it before getting demographic and social details about the client can help discourage any sort of bias.

2. Understand the Client

You have understood the client from a psychometric perspective; now you need to get acquainted with their social background. Go through their profile to figure out the major influencing factors in their lives. For instance, a student might be eyeing a career in the entertainment industry. However, their profile reflects a financial background that would not allow them to sustain themselves in such an unstable career. Now that you’re aware of this mismatch, you can address it during the session and help them find a solution.

3. Read Up!

Once you have a fairly detailed insight into the client, shift your focus to their top suggested careers. Mentoria’s analytical engine generates a list of the 30 most relevant careers you can refer to. Learn as much as you can about them, so you can suggest and shortlist careers with the client during the session. You’ll find all the information in our Career Library.

4. Stay Informed

While you’re reading up on the suggested careers, explore things like general roles and responsibilities, growth prospects, work environment, skills required, scope in India and abroad, and specialisations, if any. More importantly, note down details like payscale, courses and degrees, colleges and universities, and people and organisations they can look up to in the industry.

Looking for more valuable information on careers? Check out Mentoria’s Knowledge Gateway! We’ve got a career library full of  tips and advice as well as webinars from industry professionals. Sign up to Mentoria and get lifetime access to the Knowledge Gateway! Discover more here:

Going through this basic preparation process can help you make a session much more effective. Still wondering why preparing so diligently for each career counselling session is extremely important? Here’s a list of reasons why!

Why is preparation important?

1. Break the Ice

Getting insights into the psychometric and social background of clients in advance not only helps you ease into a conversation with them, but also connect the dots faster as you progress through the session. This holistic understanding will enable you to give them accurate advice.

2. Come All Ye Faithful!

Someone who is anxiously looking for answers is sure to be relieved when they realise their future is in good hands. When you’ve done your homework, they will truly see you as the expert, and their faith in you and the career discovery system is strengthened. This helps them open up to you, giving you more information to work with.

3. Al-right, Al-right, Al-right!

If you’re well-informed, you will know exactly what guidance to provide to clients, sharing only what’s right and relevant to them. This ensures they don’t get overwhelmed with too much content and get exactly the answers they’re looking for.

4. What’s Your Masterplan?

Once you have all the details, plan your session right down to the last minute to optimise it for your client. This will also help you avoid wasting valuable time during the session. For instance, if you find yourself or your client drifting away, a quick look at your schedule for the session will remind you to gently steer the conversation back to the actual point of discussion.

5. It’s All about Confidence

Psychologist and therapist Darsha Gandhi Mehta, one of Mentoria’s top counsellors, points out “When you counsel several clients, you end up reading about quite a few careers. This only adds to your efficiency and expertise of answering career queries. Sometimes, clients ask questions beyond the scope of their session. If you’re well-read, you can tackle such queries confidently. It does not only help you speak with much more conviction, but also instills confidence in students and, eventually, their parents.”

6. Professionalism for the Win!

At the end of the day, coming well-prepared for a session is essentially a sign of your professionalism. It shows that you’re passionate about your work and you really care about making a difference, one person at a time.

Think about all the lives you have changed throughout all the sessions you have taken – whether it’s that boy who came in looking tensed and left with a smile, or that girl whose confidence in her career choice was endorsed by you. That is the difference you can make as a well-informed and prepared professional taking a career counselling session.

Kick-start your career discovery journey with Mentoria & be sure to find the right career fit for you. Our 4-step career guidance solution, helps us find the right career fit for you from 3 streams, 850+ courses & 12,000+ careers.